Advertising on Search Engines and Social Media

To create more attention for your websites and land visitors directly on your pages, you can choose to advertise your website. In this blog post we will discuss a number of options you have for this. And how you can best reach your target audience.

With the launch of a website it can sometimes take months before you actually see visitors on your website. Content on your website must first be indexed and approved by search engines before your organic search results are visible. Optimizing that content for search engines is an entirely different topic that we have focused on in the past and will focus on in the future. This article puts the focus on website advertising and how you can take advantage of it.

Determining your target audience and what social media sites they are on

Advertising at random is not the right strategy in almost all cases. Not only can it be cost prohibitive. But may also not even reach the target audience you need on your website hosting. It is in fact the case that by no means all people are looking to make a purchase when they search for paintings in general, for example. Therefore, it is advisable to keep track with Google Analytics and other measurement tools of what your target audience is and how they interact with social media.

For example, if you have a visually appealing product or service that lends itself to lots of images, consider Pinterest or Instagram. Both platforms are particularly suitable for showcasing your products in not only a visual way. But also an interactive way.

To determine where your visitors are it is necessary to be active in this. Take a look at the different social media platforms and check out the different hashtags, communities and popular pages / users. This will often give you an idea of what people are searching for, interacting with and how active the community is. If the most popular community hasn't posted anything in six months and there is also little interaction on posts, it may not be the right platform to advertise on.

Lots of interaction, lots of posts and interest is often what you are looking for.

Furthermore, it is important to pick the right target group. It is important that the target group you are targeting also converts. On many social media you can choose the type of person who actually sees the ads. Do you want someone from Utrecht who follows the latest cooking news to sell your pan? Or do you choose a target audience that likes cooking in general? If you have a store in Utrecht for professional pans then this is more interesting to show for the enthusiast from Utrecht. Then the global target audience that is interested in cooking.

Advertising on Search Engines

Advertising on search engines with special terms or searches is for many people a very interesting candidate to advertise on. And the search engines realize that too. Therefore you often have to do your homework within the target group to keep the costs down. The key here is also to advertise to the people who convert the highest. Think again of the location example of the pan store in Utrecht.

Advertising on Search Engines can be done on almost all Search Engines. The best known is of course Google, followed by Bing, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo. These search engines are good for finding the target group you are looking for. Should you need further help or advice with this, Google and Bing also have an army of account specialists who will be happy to help you.

Advertising in Display networks

Advertising in Display networks is also a visual way of advertising. For example, you have several ad networks that work with Display ads. Again, the most common network is from Google with their Google Adsense. Website creators who have for example an information website, a blog or any other website where they do not sell anything directly, can use Google Adsense to have ads shown on their hosting. Per click or per 1,000 impressions, they can then get revenue from this.

Such display networks consist of thousands of websites, which are obviously about different subjects and have their own audience. From this audience can also be selected and optimized. A Dutch cooking blog is for example a good one for the pan store from Utrecht.

Display ads can consist of a simple piece of text with a slogan or call to action, but generally perform better with a visually attractive ad. So ask your graphic designer for some concepts. Or partner with an ad agency to create a unique ad.

Advertising on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram

If you want to advertise on a social media platform after doing research on where your target audience is, you can get started on one of the social media sites. Often you need to have a business account which can be requested or created in a few clicks. With a son business account you can then advertise. Each site has a different way of doing this and will therefore need to be looked at separately. At Pinterest they make use of sponsored pins, and you also have posts and tweets that periodically appear to your selected target groups.

Experiment and compare the results that perform best. Often you can use a combination of different websites, or focus on 1 social media site. The choice is yours.

Permanent ads on niche websites

An interesting option that can be applied at a somewhat later stage is advertising on a permanent site. The best way is if you can approach such a Niche website. These are websites that have a particular subject and then also have so many visitors per month. This can vary, of course, from a target audience of a few thousand people per month, to millions. Often the larger the target group, the more it will cost you to advertise on it.

In most cases you pay per month for such ads, as the infrastructure to track this per click is often not in place. On specific websites with very captive visitors who have a lot of interaction in the world you are in, you can often get a lot of conversion at a lower cost than the big display networks. It is often the case that you have to do your homework and ask the website owner to provide hard data from their analytics. This way you can determine if this is the right choice for your website.

We hope you got an idea of how advertising works and maybe got some new ideas. Let us know where you are getting the best results!