Internet Marketing Secrets: Beware of Things That Increase Your Advertising Cost

Whether advertising on social media is rewarding or not, the answer to the question depends on your advertising skills and what you push across to your audience. Advertisement is one of the best methods to drive traffic to a website and increase conversion and possibly, customers base. While almost everyone knows how to setup adverts on different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Google, and so on, only few people know how to setup advertisements that will convert. The believe of many people is that setting up online advertisement is the simplest thing that anyone can do. Unfortunately, most people end up wasting their money on advertisement without a single conversion.

Over the years, I have studied different forms of online advertisements, particularly Google Adwords, Facebook ads, and bing ads. Obviously, running adverts on these platforms is a great way to increase business’ exposure, get more traffic, and increase customers base. There are many other platforms to run advertisements, however, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Bing are the most popular platforms as at the time of writing this article.

If you are not aware of the secrets behind online advertising, you need to spare few minutes to read this article till the end.

I was inspired to write around this topic because I have worked with many people from different parts of the world who complaints that they run adverts but no sales or subscribers. And again, after conducting a couple of research, I found that most people who run adverts on search engines and social media are not aware of the dummies that increase their advertising cost. In the next few paragraphs, I will explain what I mean by “the dummies that increase advertising cost”, and talk about some ways to improve your ads conversion.

The word “dummy” as used in this article refers to PEOPLE who your adverts are served to, but do not increase your conversion, yet increase your advertising cost. I have categorize them into different segments in the next couple of paragraphs.

No 1. Freebie seekers

A lot of people believe that freebie seekers can turn into paid customers if the subsequent offers are appealing to them. No dispute, some freebie seekers may turn into your loyal customers after some time, but the truth is that most of them may not increase your conversion at all. If you run ads on Google, and it comes up when freebie seekers search for a particular thing which is available for sale on your site, chances that they will click on your ad and close the webpage immediately they discover that you’re selling the product is very high. For a better understanding I have decided to demonstrate this point using Google search.

In the image above I searched for “free online jobs”, which means that I am looking for online jobs that I can start without upfront payment. Now the first result is a paid advert, which is still related to my query. Unfortunately, if you check “Olymptrade” website, you’ll realize that they trade currency, which means that you need to start by investing certain amount of money. For newbies who are looking for free online jobs, they won’t stay long on Olymptrade website because money is involve, yet clicked on the advert. Now if 100 newbies who are looking for free online jobs clicked on the advert, about 95% or more will close the webpage once they realize that money is involved. With this, they increase the advertiser’s cost and the website bounce rate without increasing their conversion.

No 2. Idea Seekers

I still don’t know if there are ways to prevent idea seekers from clicking on ads that are meant for serious people. You’ll agree with me that search engines are used for different purposes, and not everyone that clicks on ads are looking to buying your products. Nowadays, many people use search engine to conduct research about business opportunities. If you’re not familiar with the best keywords to use to target the right people, your ads may end up reaching people who are looking for business ideas, and not ready to buy your products. In situation like this, the most important thing is to understand your market and the suitable keywords for your adverts.

If you’re running adverts on search engine, you need to understand the various ad groups available for you. Some ad groups might drive huge untargeted traffic to your site if you don’t do your research very well. Without talking too much, idea seekers are some of the people that can increase your advertising costs without conversion.

In the image above I searched for “how to write SEO content”, and the first 3 results are adverts. If I was looking for SEO companies, the first and the third links might be the best place for me to go. However, since I was looking for “how to write SEO content”, these ads don’t seem to be relevant, and if I clicked on them, I might close the webpage immediately. One of the reasons why I will definitely close the webpage is because they are portfolio sites. I was looking for article that explains “how to write SEO content”, and not SEO companies.

Now that I understand what I was looking for, I don’t need to click on the adverts because they probably don’t have what I wanted. Assuming someone told me I should publish SEO contents on my site and I went to Google to search for “How to”, and these results came up, I will click out of ignorance and leave the site immediately I can’t find anything like that. This is another way people help you waste your advertising credit.

No 3. Your competitors

The last sets of people who increase advertising cost without increasing conversions are competitors. I have helped many people do competition analysis for their business, and one of the ways I verify the data is by doing manual research on search engines. Because I know the cost of running ads on search engines, I don’t click directly on ads during my research. Unfortunately, many competitors will click ads without considering the cost of running it.

If your competitors are the one clicking your ads, definitely, you can’t get sales from them. Sometimes we have to agree that it is a price everyone has to pay.

Like I said earlier, setting up your ad is not the major thing, but the ability to set it properly. All the issues discussed above can be prevented or at least minimized if you know the intricacies of online advertising. My concluding statement is that online advertising is a difficult thing because you are spending money in the hope of getting customers. However, if you’re not getting returns from your efforts, you need to do something else or look for experienced person to assist you.