Digital Marketing & Web Analytics: Where to Advertise?

When research shows that roughly nine-in-ten Americans use the internet¹, a business that doesn’t exist on any digital format today almost doesn’t exist to consumers. More consumers than ever start their research online, with 81% of them conducting online research before buying and 60% starting their research on a search engine.²

Digital management should be a priority for companies looking to increase brand awareness, acquire additional customers, and improve their reputation online.

Determining how to be noticed on digital mediums, and how to successfully market to and track the consumers who find you online, is vital to your business’ success. Making data-based decisions is always an important factor; this is true for your online marketing attribution as well as your offline attribution.

Having a solid digital management system in place helps ensure you are viewing the whole marketing journey, delivering content to your consumers in any possible way that they want it.

Digital Marketing and Web Analytics

To implement an effective digital strategy, you need to track your digital marketing and web analytics.

Web Analytics

Web analytics involves the process of the collection, measurement, and analysis of user activity on a website to understand and help achieve the intended objective of the website.

The objective is usually one or a combination of:

• Increased revenue
• Lower cost
• Improved customer service/experience

Web analytics works alongside digital marketing. Web analytics can make certain that website content and the overall website user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are tailored to the behavior and interests of the target audience.

You can monitor your website users and optimize your business’ website to appeal to the navigational tendencies of customers, formulating and updating your digital marketing plan of action depending on their interactions.

Digital Marketing

A lot of web analytics depend on digital marketing. Digital marketing is a term given to any form of marketing products and services through online channels. Channels are high-level categories indicating how people found a site. Put simply: where did they come from?

There are a few different channels that consumers use to find you in the digital world:

• Organic
  • Traffic from users who land on your page from clicking a listed link on a search engine results page that was listed naturally – someone did not pay to get the result in high ranking.

• Paid
  • Traffic from search engine results that is the result of paid advertising via Google Adwords or another paid search platform.

• Direct
  • Traffic that has come to your site by either typing in your URL in their address bar or clicking on a bookmark. In general, this indicates visits where users navigate directly to the URL or the source of the visit is unknown.

• Referral
  • Traffic that has come from another site to your site, not relating to traffic coming from a search engine.
    • Examples might include: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any site/domain not owned by you.

SEM vs. SEO

A lot of digital marketing and web analytics depend on search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).

An easy way to remember these two differences is SEM is paid while SEO is not.

SEM is a form of internet marketing that increases a site’s visibility through paid search engine results and advertising; it includes things such as paid ads and 3rd party websites.

SEM results are short-lived, quick results. Usually you will pay per each result:

• Cost per click (CPC)
• Cost per lead (CPL)
• Cost per acquisition (CPA)

SEO is an organic way of increasing the number of website visitors by getting your site to appear high in search ranking results.

SEO results are long-lasting; you must be vigilant with SEO to stay ahead of the trends. A few examples of ways to optimize your page for SEO are:

• Publish relevant content
• Improve page loading speed
• Optimize images
• Remove broken links
• And much more

SEM and SEO are much more in-depth topics, but they both have a high impact on digital marketing and website optimization plans.

Find out how SEO and call tracking can work together
to help your brand.

Advertising on Digital

In addition to your static advertising campaigns, it is important to have digital advertising for your business, no matter what industry you are in. In fact, research shows that digital channels will overtake traditional mediums by 2021.³

Tracking offline to online (O2O) through dynamic number insertion
will help your marketing attribution efforts.

Hopefully, you are already advertising in digital, but whether or not you are, you may need some assistance in deciding exactly where to advertise. While it is vital that you do some research on what mediums your “ideal customers” spend time on, there are still many places to choose from, since there is a slew of options on the internet.

Although this isn’t a full, comprehensive list, below are some of the most popular places for businesses to place digital advertisements to get you started.

PPC

Pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC, is a form of digital advertising that prompts advertisers to bid to have their ads displayed on popular websites to generate traffic.

Every time that an ad is clicked, the advertiser must pay a fee. PPC basically allows you to “buy” traffic for your website, web pages, or wherever you direct users to when they click on your ad. One of the most popular forms of PPC advertising is paid search advertising, also known as search engine advertising. This kind of digital advertising allows advertisers to bid for top ad placement on a search results page.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords reign so supreme in the world of PPC advertising platforms that Google Ads are now almost known as being synonymous with PPC.
With Google Ads, instead of bidding to have your ads displayed on popular websites, you must bid on certain keywords to have your ads displayed at the top of Google’s search results – a hard spot to earn organically by getting to the top of page one search results.

Bing

Second to Google is Bing, another popular search engine that has 34% share of the U.S. search market.⁴

Bing is a cheaper alternative to Google advertising since it is not as dominant in the market, yet still relevant. Bing partners with Yahoo for their ad network, which means your reach is expanded when advertising with Bing.

Bing lets you control campaigns at a more granular level than Yahoo and has more targeting options as well.

It is also relevant to note that voice-search is becoming increasingly popular, and power-house Amazon’s Alexa product gains all of its search results from Bing. Keep this in mind, as it may mean that Bing will become more prominent in the coming years.

Display Ads

Display advertising allows the advertiser to have ads placed on relevant third-party sites in the form of a banner, image, or text ad. They can be placed anywhere on the page – but must be optimized to target audiences, and should direct to a specific landing page as well.

Email Marketing

Most lead generation strategies are focused around collecting a form of contact – usually an email address – from a potential lead. Email marketing is said to be one of the most effective forms of digital advertising, with an ROI upwards of 40%, according to reports.⁵

Email marketing allows brands to talk to their prospects more personally on a consistent, ongoing basis. If a consumer is committing to receive your emails, then they have a higher probability of engaging with your brand.

With the potential for higher conversions than most other forms of digital advertising, email marketing is a must for any smart digital marketer.

Social Media

Advertising on social media keeps increasing since social media usage stays on the rise.

There are many social media platforms to advertise on. Make sure you discover where your “ideal customers” spend their time and target those social media channels to test out your advertising. Below are a few of the most popular platforms.

Facebook

Not surprisingly, Facebook dominates the social media world. As of 2018, almost 70% of U.S. adults are Facebook users, according to Pew Internet Research.⁶

YouTube

YouTube is also a top contender in social media channels, with roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults and 94% of 18-24-year-olds using the video-sharing site.⁶

Others

Below are some of the other most popular social media platforms that you should pay attention to, and research more to see if it is worth the effort for your business to advertise on. Keep in mind there are more than this list contains – make sure you know which social media platforms are most relevant to your business, your consumers, and your industry.

Twitter	Instagram	Snapchat
LinkedIn	Pinterest	WhatsApp

Video

Research shows that 25% of US digital ad spend went to video in 2018.5 The most common video advertising can be found on video channels such as YouTube, but keep in mind that social-media leader Facebook also captured almost one-quarter of all video ad spend in 2018.

Video isn’t only becoming more popular for digital ads – but a more popular way of consuming content overall, so you want to make sure that you are present in more types of ads than just static text or photo content.

Where to advertise

No matter where you choose to advertise, make sure your decisions are based on research and tested to see what your most viable digital advertising platforms really are. You will need to correctly attribute each platform with the attribution model that you choose that works best for your business’s needs, and whether cookie-based or a tracking component without cookies works for your tracking attribution purposes.

Correctly attribute online to offline marketing attribution

Once you start advertising on digital and paying attention to your paid and organic mediums online, you want to make sure you are attributing your ads correctly and efficiently.

To learn more about how DNI can help you achieve this, request a representative to reach out to you, or call us today at 888.788.0123.

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