Building an effective online display advertising campaign is tied to four things:

1. Your Offering - Products or Services.

2. Your Website.

3. Ad Attractiveness and Content.

4. Audience ads are delivered to.

To start an effective advertising campaign a simple written plan should be put in place outlining your advertising strategies:

1. Your overall expectations for your online display advertising campaign.

2. Your market; who are you trying to reach, your target audience.

3. Online advertising mediums for reaching your target audience.

4. Your sales cycle.

5. Your marketing and advertising goals.

6. Your budget.

The next steps for preparing an effective online advertising plan are:

1.Define Sale Goals:

Produce immediate responses for building revenue

Long term – support long sales cycles, build relationships.

Recurring Revenue - selling services

2. Define Marketing Goals:

Branding

Email list building

Market Awareness

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

All of the above

Defining your expectations will provide you the base information for putting your advertising strategies in place and developing your ads. Your plan does not have to be extensive. It can be 2-3 pages with each topic briefly defined along with forecast numbers for monitoring results against expectations.

What contributes to an online display advertising campaigns success?

1. Website relevance to your products or services that your ads are run on. Example; if you want to reach a specific type pet owner your ads should run on websites that address your particular pet products or services to insure you reach the right buying audience. Example Horse Advertising Network.com for horse related products and services. This is known as vertical advertising.

2. Ad; Visual and Content. How the ad relates to your potential buying audience and the landing page you are sending clicks to. The landing page is very important.

3. Ad Views (Impressions); the more ad views on multiple websites the more likely clicks will increase. Familiarity, repetitiveness, relevancy and viewer need (today or future) lead to clicks or book marking your website for future reference.

4. Click Through Rate (CTR); CTR is the beginning of measuring your ads success. Ad quality and website determines the CTR. If the ad is running on relevant websites, reaching the audience interested in your product or service, and the ad views are high, but the CTR is low or non existent, then ad quality is more likely the problem. If the CTR is good, more ad views will get you more clicks resulting in a higher probability of converting clicks to actual sales (Conversion Rate).

5. Your website; Time spent on your website and how it converts to sales (Conversion Rate - CR) is the final test. You can have all the clicks in the world; if your website is weak and does not provide the information the person thinks they are going to get the CR will be low or zero.

6. Monitoring your ads, campaigns and website is a must. Having an analytics program such as Google Analytics on you website is needed to continuously monitor your website performance. There are several important parameters you can monitor. The three key items that support your online display advertising campaign are:

Where visitors are coming from; called referral websites.

Average time visitors spend on your website; or bounce rate.

Conversion of visitors visiting your website taking the action you want them to take. This based on conversion goals you setup.

Improving ad performance requires online advertising management for both your ads and your campaigns. Instant knowledge of how your ad is performing is critical. Only by doing so can you make ad or campaign adjustments as needed. Managing your ads and campaigns also allows you to control cost resulting in a higher return on your advertising investment.

Contrary to what one might think, clicks do not necessarily assure sales. The click through rates and conversion rates may even have an inverse relationship. A poorly developed ad or an ad geared towards curiosity clicks will result in fewer conversions than a well developed ad geared to promote a good website that backs up the ad. Directing clicks to the wrong landing page will also result in a low to zero CR.

A good advertising media for online display advertising campaigns are a vertical, or niche market, online advertising networks. Vertical advertising provides an advertiser the ability to get a high volume of ad views from multiple online websites that focus on the right audience. Vertical advertising networks instantaneously monitor results so you can immediately make ad or campaign adjustments to improve CTR and CR. Vertical, or niche advertising networks often allow hands on campaign management so your business goals and message are strictly defined by you thus increasing the campaigns chance of success.

An important side benefit in using a vertical advertising network is increased quality links to your website which supports your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.

People are buying, just more selectively; they are doing more comparison shopping. The economy is improving but the buying public will continue to buy selectively. Getting your ads in front of the proper audience, at the right time, as often as possible, is the key to having a successful online display advertising campaign. Internet online advertising is your best solution for generating sales when directed to your target market.