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According to a recent report from Bloomberg, the numbers of customers using Facebook advertising within the past year have trebled,. The proliferation of targeted advertisements, which is in stark contrast to Twitter’s stand against paid ads, has clearly caught the attention of businesses and marketers everywhere, as well as the consumers.

By utilising the data that Facebook have on record, including location, age, interests and relationship status, advertisers can hone in on their key demographic and really achieve some eye-catching results. Due to the vast nature of the social networking site’s reach, you can connect with thousands, if not millions of potential customers through a single advertisement. Similarly you can localise your adverts, benefiting smaller businesses looking to trade within a certain region.

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…at least that’s what Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter had to say at a recent conference.

He said “There are a few reasons why we’re not pursuing advertising; one is, it’s just not quite as interesting to us.”

This is refreshing in the social landscape where many of the social media properties can’t seem to think beyond advertising when it comes to generating revenues.

Obviously, Twitter needs to find streams of income and it’ll be interesting to see what strategies they pursue. With the rising popularity of this microblogging platform, I’m sure they’re not short of innovative ideas.

One of the benefits of online marketing when compared to offline alternatives is the huge reduction in costs. There are many financial benefits to Internet marketing, here are just a few explained:

Cheap but Effective
Kicking off, one of the major benefits of marketing online is that it is very cost effective. In fact it’s not only much cheaper than traditional advertising, but it’s also many times more efficient because it only targets the people that you want to target, rather than blanketing whole groups of people by location or broadcasting region.

With online marketing, you only pay for what you use. Take a look at Pay Per Click or PPC, you only pay for when interested people from your target market click on your ads, that saves money, time, and only attracts the already interested to your website. With lower costs and more precise targeting, online marketing seems like a no-brainer!

Cutting Expenditure
One of the top financial benefits of online marketing is that you can reduce your annual expenditure by making most of the process from advertising through to purchase automated. You will need someone to direct your online marketing, but you can reduce your sales and marketing salary costs.

If most of your sales process now takes place online, you can move to smaller premises, because you won’t need the physical space and that means a reduction in rent, utilities and insurance. What’s more if you use a catalogue for your products, you can avoid costly printing and distribution costs.

Global Marketing Power
Online marketing means that you can sell to anyone at any time. You don’t need a physical store because you have an online store that is open 24/7. This means you can sell your products to anyone, anywhere around the clock. You’re no longer restricted by time and location considerations. Your revenue potential just increased while your costs have diminished!

Staying Power
When you use article marketing as a tool, you may pay once for someone to write that article, but it will stay on the Internet for many years to come. Where else can you place a marketing proposition and have it stay around pointing at your products and services indefinitely for no added cost?

Emails Cost Nothing
Compared to direct marketing or telemarketing, email marketing costs relatively nothing, yet you get to deliver your proposition directly to your target market. You can send thousands of targeted messages directly into the homes and offices of your potential or existing customers with immediate responses.

Measure your Return on Investment
Unlike traditional methods of advertising, you can immediately measure you ROI with online marketing. This is particularly the case with PPC advertising where analytical tools help you to track sales from specific ads through to conversion. This helps you to reduce costs even further by discontinuing ads that aren’t working. With a television advert or billboard, it would be impossible to test the success as accurately.

Online marketing has revolutionised marketing, advertising and sales, it offers great financial benefits and if you’re not using it to its full potential then you’re wasting a great opportunity!

It’s well documented that marketing to social networkers has not turned out to be the golden goose that many had predicted.

Where search dominates online marketing opportunities, many companies are finding that, despite reaching a level of maturity in Internet terms, the social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo etc., are struggling to turn high visitor numbers into meaningful ad revenues.

Now, an article from eMarketer – Social Networkers Aren’t There for Ads – highlights the fact that many social networkers still shun advertising with a high proportion seeing it as inappropriate to have their personal information utilised for marketing purposes.

At Impact Media, our social media marketing services can help you pick your way through this marketing jungle and develop a strategy that fits with your business objectives.

In 1998 computer magnate Bill Gates was targeted by pie terrorists in Brussels and pelted with cream pies for taking himself too seriously. In California, in the same year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were busy giving birth to Google. In 2008 – the year of its tenth birthday – Google is a household name, having graduated from slang use to an official verb (‘to google’) and included in dictionaries in the UK and US. Google has changed the way we think and the way we live our lives. It has changed the way we do business and organise our leisure time. Search engines have become an indispensable extension of our brains.

So, what effect has all this googling had on the traditional ways of advertising and doing business? In today’s competitive climate a business, no matter how small, cannot ignore the necessity of having a website. Marketing budgets are changing from traditional routes to focus on Internet searches and Google ads.

Since its introduction in the UK in 2002, Google’s UK advertising revenue has risen beyond anyone’s expectations (or worst nightmares). While Google’s revenue has increased by somewhere close to 40% each year, giants like ITV1 have seen their revenue decrease by around 7%. According to statistics reported in The Guardian, Google’s UK advertising revenue has been steadily increasing and crushing all other forms of media advertising:

2003 – £70 m – Google UK trailing all other media
2004 – £201m – a massive jump, putting it ahead of cinema advertising
2005 – £439m – overtaking ad revenue of Channel 5 (£300m)
2006 – £802m – overtaking Channel 4 network, ahead of radio by almost double (£458m) and consumer magazines (£698m).
2007 – £1.265bn – ahead of business magazines ($835m) and multi-channel TV market ad revenue (£974m)

The gurus predict Google’s UK 2008 advertising revenue will reach £1.74bn, putting it ahead of ITV1 and national newspapers. Also likely to find themselves in the cross hairs for the New Year are Google’s remaining competitors, the regional newspapers (£2.33bn in 2008) and commercial television sector (£3.5bn in 2008).

The old methods of targeting customers are becoming less and less viable as consumers find what they need via Google. A website gives businesses the chance to target potential customers with a myriad of information and possibilities such as directions and maps, tempting special offers and mailing lists, as well as bookmarking and sharing options.

Advertisers are learning that in order to maximise search results they need to fine-tune their landing pages and advertising copy – usually with the help of SEO professionals. According to Google, its largest advertising areas are in retail, finance, travel, automotive and technology. One major and significant benefit of investing in online advertising over traditional methods such as television, newspapers, magazines and radio is the ability to track results.

Statistics provided for 2008 by comScore and Hitwise show that Google continues to command the lion’s share of the UK search market and search engine rankings in the U.S. Google is no sleeping giant and so far has fended off cream-pie attacks as it has set about decimating the marketing income of traditional offline media.

Source of Google UK statistics:
The Guardian – April 2008

Google have just announced a change in their policy for companies wishing to advertise gambling related services online using their AdWords pay per click advertising platform within the UK.

Google’s announcement explains that this policy change for gambling advertisers has come about “due to recent changes in UK law” and to “bring it inline with the legal and cultural climate around this issue in the UK”.

The statement goes on to say “Our review determined that, at this time, we will allow gambling ads to target England, Scotland and Wales as long as the advertiser is registered with the Gambling Commission and provides a valid operating license number.”

Any gambling site wishing to use pay per click advertising to promote their business will first of all need to create a new Google AdWords account and complete an application form for Google. They will then review the application and notify the advertiser whether they have been successful or not.

Given the competitive nature of the industry, we would anticipate pay per click costs being high for AdWords gambling advertising in the UK and would suggest that new advertisers consider using Google AdWords management services if they’re unsure how to build an optimised campaign.

Back in the Nineties, if your website had really made it, it was found on Yahoo.  But since its development and massive expansion, Google has been the be-all and end-all of Internet Search Engines.  As Google has expanded their silent monopoly they have changed the way that companies think about advertising and inevitably changed the way we all go about the process of planning on and offline marketing strategies.

In the past 8 years, Google have dramatically influenced or changed:

• How we advertise
• Where we advertise
• Who is advertising
• What we pay to advertise

Google began experimenting with online CPM (Cost Per 1000 clicks) advertising back in 1999. Unlike the then ubiquitous banner ads, Google’s ads were designed to be unobtrusive text ads based on search terms and kept separate from the main search engine results.  At this stage, you bought your ads from a Google Ad Sales Rep, like the traditional offline ads.

In 2000 the Dot Com bubble burst and online advertising briefly vanished.  When Google bounced back, they turned their Search-based Text Ads into the forerunner of the self-service PPC/CPM system we have today.  Google essentially invented PPC or Pay per Click advertising.  Now we bid to hold the primary position for certain search terms and customise our ad campaign to hit matching searches within specified geographic regions.

Google’s Search-based advertising changed the way advertising works online.  For the first time it specifically targeted people who were actively looking for the product or service advertised.  This creates uniquely cost effective advertising and every click has a potential sale attached to it.

Google put the power to design and orchestrate commanding advertising campaigns directly into the hands of anyone with a credit card. Since you can advertise on Google for a price within any budget, you can reach millions of customers across the UK for only a tiny fraction of the cost of television, radio or newspaper advertising. PPC and CPM allow us to set our own budgets and bid for the top advertising spots on the Internet.

Google have changed the way that we all think of advertising and how we use it.   Now a small greengrocer in London can compete for attention with the big high street supermarkets.  Now a small home IT business in Southampton can compete for new business with a massive corporate IT business in Edinburgh.

With 69% of the UK’s population regularly using the Internet, and 87% of online searches using Google, when your potential customer wants to find something, they look to Google.  This has made Google the most powerful advertisement placement position ever.

As Google Pay per Play Video is rapidly advancing and online video advertising overtakes offline video advertising in terms of amount spent, experts believe that Google will strongly influence and change advertising habits on and offline in the future.

Google’s influence is so strong that we no longer ’search’ for something, we Google it, the brand has entered the popular lexicon as a verb and that’s advertising that can’t be bought!

According to a recent survey commissioned by Internet Advertising Bureau UK, the amount of money invested in online advertising has risen to £1.33 billion for the first six months of this year compared to £917.2 million for the same period in 2006.

The survey goes on to suggest that UK online advertising spend could reach £2.75 billion by the end of 2007.

Such has been the growth in UK Internet advertising that it now accounts for almost 15% of all UK advertising. Again, this is a figure that most expect will continue to rise in the coming years as more businesses and individuals move over to the Internet.

57.1% of the total spent to date has been invested in paid search, or Pay per Click (PPC). With £762.3 million spent, this is a 44% increase compared to 2006.