Feeling The Pinch – How To Manage An Advertising Budget

With the global economy struggling and budgets tight, it may seem hard to keep a solid campaign going when it comes to advertising. The temptation to cut your ad budget to the bone may be strong, but you should carefully consider all of your options before shutting down what might be your main source of targeted traffic.

First you should analyze your site to see where your sales are coming from. Do you get the most conversions from your pay per click, or from your affiliate links? Are there certain inbound links to pages on your site that have a high conversion?

If you find that certain pages result in more sales, you should consider optimizing to bring more traffic to them. Likewise, you should optimize your other pages to get a similar effect – obviously something is working!

If your pay per click visitors come in during certain times of day, you could consider scheduling your ads to run during a specified time frame – Google now allows this, and can also let you tailor other aspects of your campaign to more narrowly target your desired demographic.

You should also consider optimizing for long tail keywords, to maximize your ROI. The payout for these keywords is often much lower and the return much higher, so the effort required to produce optimized content and drive traffic is well worth it.

Go back over your ad content. It’s important not only to optimize your ad, but to draw the consumer in and pre-sell the item. You don’t want the click, you want the sale – so don’t bother hyping your product or service – this will only bring in ‘window shoppers’ who will run up your click spend with no remuneration in the way of sales.

Instead, figure out what your paying customers respond to, and focus on that. Make sure you are able to back up any claims made with solid evidence, good product and excellent service. Honest, truthful advertising plus highly effective targeting equals sales.

Another thing you can consider is spreading your advertising budget across a few more venues. You don’t have to confine yourself to online ads. TV, radio and print advertising is alive and well, and you can often see a spike in traffic after a many-pronged ad campaign.

Press releases are advertising too, and have the added benefit of reaching a lot more customers in your targeted demographic. By utilizing all of these methods, you can maximize your advertising dollar at a time when belt tightening seems to be in order in all venues.