In this article, I’ll discuss why Internet based marketing can give you a better return on your investment versus traditional, off-line marketing. Let’s start with an example.

Let’s say that you go to your local newspaper and tell them that you want to place an ad with them. While you’re there, you ask what their circulation is (their number of readers). They give you an estimate. You also ask them what their demographics are. They give you a general answer, because they don’t really 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.

Now, of course, you need to wait and have your ad go out in the next newspaper edition. After about a week, you start to get some calls and some website traffic. You measure that against what your ad cost you. You might find that with 10 leads, the ad is costing you five dollars a visitor, for a final ad cost of $50.

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.

Your ad goes live within fifteen minutes, using Google as an example. You only pay for people who click on your link and in this case you are paying $1.00 per click. Let?s say you convert at 2%. So 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.

You can also tell with the broader keywords how exactly people are finding you. Additionally, you can place ads on other websites with exact demographic information which are highly 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.

Another point to make is that pay per click is only one way to advertise online. You can also use other cost-effective marketing techniques online, such as targeted article writing relevant to your business, writing a press release, and running advertisements in complementary online e-zines. Perhaps the most effective of these, though, is e-mail marketing, as long as it’s done correctly.

Internet based marketing can cut your costs; provide more information, enabling you to run better marketing campaigns. Additionally, the turn around time is faster and as a result you get better information sooner.