In this article, I am going to go over a few key points as to why internet based marketing will give you a better return on your investment over that of offline marketing. Let?s begin with an example.

You go to your local newspaper and you tell them you want to place an ad. While there, you ask them how many readers they have or what are the circulation numbers – and they give you a round about number. You also ask, what the demographics are, and they give you a general answer, as they do not exactly know.

So you place the ad in the classified section and wait to see what happens. By the way, on your ad you put a code on your website URL so you know how many visitors you are getting from that ad, and second, with the phone number you also add a code, so you know where the calls are coming from.

In the interim, you wait for your ad to go out on the next edition of the newspaper. After a week, you start to get some traffic and calls, and then you measure that against the price of your ad. You may find that with ten leads, the ad is costing $5.00 per visitor with a total ad cost of $50.00.

With the above example, let’s say that we make one sale. And of course, you may get other calls over the coming weeks. Oftentimes, people don’t respond to a newspaper ad until a bit after it’s run.

Let’s compare this with internet based advertising. First off, try a pay per click ad campaign. This allows you to narrowly target your campaign by using the keywords of your choice which you think are relevant to your product or service and that will attract visitors to your site. You can also try out more general keywords and see what results you get.

With this example, your ad goes live within just 15 minutes, using, let’s say, Google. You don’t pay unless people click on your link; if they do, you pay a dollar. Let’s say that your conversion rate is 2%. This means that you spend $100 to make two sales.

However in this example because of conversion tracking you can tell which keywords are converting to sales and cut out the keywords that do not convert making your ad campaign more cost efficient and effective.

In addition, because you’ve also used broader keywords, you can see how many people are finding you with this “one size fits most” method. You can also place ads on other websites with exact demographic information, which will be extremely targeted to your business.

What’s the point of all this? Basically, when you compare advertising in traditional venues such as the newspaper with online advertising, you can measure your performance with online advertising much more efficiently.

By the way, pay per click is only one form of online marketing, there are many other effective marketing techniques you can use online, such as writing articles relative to your business, doing a press release, adverting in relevant online ezines and one of the most effective online marketing techniques is e-mail marketing, that is if it is done correctly.

Internet based marketing can significantly reduce your costs. It can also provide more information that lets you run more efficient and better marketing campaigns. In addition, your turnaround time is faster so that you get better information much sooner than you do with traditional venues.