Back then, a business would pay an advertising firm and if sales went up, the advertising firm got some of the credit.

Now, a business pays an advertising firm when they get sales (or leads).

Back then, an advertising firm would make estimates about how many people saw that businesses ads.

Now, the business can know the exact numbers of how many people see the ads, how many people interact with the ads, and how many people complete an action that the ad intended, such as filling out a form.

Back then, a businesses advertisement would run for a fixed time for testing, often as long as a season or year.

Now, an advertising firm can react daily to change and improve ads.  Ads that work get shown more and ads that do not work get turned off immediately.

The difference is that a business can now prove that it makes more money in profits than the expense of the ad campaign.

It is time for your business to move into the Now.

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Marketing and Advertising are essentially lead generation, or better yet “action” generation tools. There is always an intended action regardless of what kind of marketing or advertising is taking place. Sometimes that action is obvious like a person calling a number, purchasing a product or service, or filling out a form or email. Other times the action is less direct, but someone at some point is spending money, and therefore there is a desired result which is this “action”. As these fields increasingly move online, these “actions” become easier to measure as a whole.

The Basics of the Marketing & Advertising process online

The internet is really one huge “action” network, and it is increasingly moving in that direction. Everything online can be tracked, assorted, analyzed, marketed to, measured, and tested, which previously was impossible. The beauty of the internet is that this allows us to adapt in real-time. We can now, almost immediately, see the results of our marketing and advertising initiatives {actions} and begin to optimize these results.

There are too many aspects of marketing and advertising online to discuss in this post in great detail, however I will go ahead and breakdown the basics of what goes into a well run advertisement. Again, many of these steps can be applied to both a large corporation or a small local business, because in the end almost all actions happen at a local level, even if it is a multi-national marketing campaign. So the following steps should be used in all advertising campaigns online if you want to optimize your results and make money.

Step 1. Identify your desired action. (product sale, phone call, email capture, video view, etc.)

Step 2. Identify your desired geographic location to target for each specific action.

Step 3. Identify your target market using very specific demographics (Facebook demographics – age, gender, interests, etc)

Step 4. Identify what your targeted audience is looking for with Keyword Groups (i.e. Search Engine Keyword Searches)

*Note – advertising platforms focus on different things. For instance Facebook & LinkedIn are examples of ad platforms where you can target very specific demographics, whereas Google and other Search Engines focus more on user intent.

Step 5. Create your Ads based on Steps 1-4. (Notice this should always be plural. One of the biggest advantages of the internet is the ability to test ads against each other to see which are most successful)

Step 6. When you create your ads on certain platforms (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) assign the keyword group you created (step 4) to the ads you created (step 5)

Step 7. The destination of your Ad should link the consumer to a ‘landing page’ designed to initiate the desired action. Landing Pages are pages on a website that are designed to convert an action. I would argue that all webpages should be viewed as a landing page. (Landing Pages that match the advertisement copy and keywords have much higher success rates). In other words, if you send your traffic to a page that matches your ad, your conversion numbers will increase.

Step 8. Split test all individual variables against each other (this may take some time depending upon the volume of traffic). This includes ad copy, keywords, landing pages, ad targeting, etc.

Step 9. Analyze. Make appropriate changes. Repeat.

If you take this step by step approach to marketing, and continue to measure the results, make changes, and repeat, you will slowly but surely optimize your campaigns. This will mean your dollar spent will go further ,therefore increasing your ROI on this campaign. As a business owner or employee you can gain incredible insight into what drives people to these certain actions. This can help your Business in countless other ways aside from achieving the desired results from a specific marketing/advertising campaign.

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The old ad manager was very archaic and impeding. The front page of the interface screen had all of your campaigns laid out with the title of each ad displayed. If you are only handling one campaign, it was simple to use, but with multiple campaigns with multiple ads in each, it was a pain in the a** to say the least. The old interface made it difficult to analyze the data in the campaigns and time consuming to sift through each campaign to find exactly what you were looking for.

Now, the new ads manager has made some strides and good improvements. First off, the front page lays out all of your campaigns without the ads. You can macro-manage each campaign from this front screen, and if you want to go into the nuts and bolts, you can click into the campaign to make changes. The daily budget and spend is right there on the front page as well, though my dates are off (must be a bug). You can also search for an individual ad easily with a search box located on the left sidebar. All of these are nice upgrades and happy to see they removed the cumbersome home page that was with the old ads manager.

There is a still a ways to go for Facebook. They did not make any changes to their reporting and believe this will be their next step. Also, I would like the ability to hide paused ads (have the same issue with Adwords). I like to pause my ads but not delete them for CTR reasons, however, I don’t want to have to look at them on a daily basis.

Overall, I am happy with the changes and believe the right steps are being taken to help out us internet marketing managers who are in these screens for hours on end on a daily basis.

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