5 Tips for Buying Web Advertising

If you are new to business, or just new to buying advertising then there are a few general rules you need to be following to avoid watching your advertising pennies play Houdini on you with no return, and believe me it can and will happen.

Tip 1: Don't be tricked by false looking stats such as someones page views/impressions. It is easy to have plenty of 00000's on the end of these figures but if the views are not unique then it does not mean much. Always find out how many unique visits a site gets and concentrate on that rather than the number of page views.

Tip 2: Target relevant sites....too many people get carried away when they see a cool looking website and automatically think it will get results. Even if a cool site gets good traffic, if it is not targeted to your target audience then you are throwing your money away.

Tip 3: Don't use crap banners....your banner quality and message is almost as if not more than important than where it is placed. You can pick a really good site to advertise and get the big top header spot, non rotating on all pages but if your banner design is poor and your message is not clear then you will get poor results.

Tip 4: Always include a call to action in your banners.....you can have a great banner design on a great site with the best placement as I mentioned in tip 3, but one other key point (unless you are Coca-Cola or someone) is that you need to have a call to action in your banners. This means your target audience need to look at your banner and read something which makes them want to click it and read more. Having buttons with actions in a banner are increasingly recommended in banners and are proved to increase your click rates too.

Tip 5: Measure your results....if you don't have any way of tracking your clicks from your advert then how will you ever really know if your placement worked or not? Set-up some sort of ad management system on your banner or monitor your Google or web statistics to show how many visits you are getting within the period of time your advert is online. You will find these in the referrer stats on most stat systems.

That's all for now folks, hope this was a little helpful for you advertising newbies out there.

http://www.advertiserbay.co.uk