Where Should You Spend Your Advertising Dollars Online?
Finding a place that is willing to take your advertising budget online is never a problem. The problem is knowing knowing which location to choose to advertise at and making sure that you received a good return for your investment. There are a few things that you must consider when you are searching out ad buys.
What Industry Are They In
Being in the scuba diving industry is a fairly well defined niche already. If you are buying ad space on scuba diving sites that are specific to the area that you are trying to promote, this is a good starting point, but there is much more to consider. There are all kinds of scuba directories out there which are available to internet visitors. Some of them do get a lot of traffic. The problem is many of them don’t. A good starting point to find out if there is much value in buying a link is “Googling” what you are trying to be found for. If you google “scuba diving in Costa Rica” and your dive shop is found before any of the directories, well they may not be of the most value to you unless it is a site that people use to find information instead of google. PADI.com is one example of this that I would always get listed on if I was a dive shop owner. If you want to branch out and attract new divers to your shop, then getting in a general travel directory is a great idea. There are also many free place which you can be listed around the web which receive a fair bit of relevant traffic. I always recommend listing in all of these locations. This is something I do for all of my clients.
Are The Ads Converting? Monitor Your Ads
The old saying “you never know until you try” is kind of true in the advertising game as well. When searching out places to advertise, I make the best educated prediction that I can on whether there will be much value in buying a link, but at the end of the day I have been wrong before and will be again. Some ads I have placed that I thought would be sure bets have gotten next to nothing and some that I thought were hail mary’s have brought in new customers. Once you decide on a plan and start going with it, make sure that you check in regularly to see what type of performance you are getting from your ads. This is relatively easy to do if you know your way around Google Analytics. You can see how many clicks came from your ad, how many and what pages they viewed when they visited your site, if they made contact with you on any of the pages, and with this date you can get a pretty good idea of how many customers you actually received for the dollars you spent.
