How Much Does Internet Marketing Cost?
The internet is the new medium for watching countless hours of entertainment, connecting with your loved ones and also reaching new customers. If you have never done it before, internet marketing can seem quite intimidating due to the various metrics involved as well as the software that you will need to master. In this article, we are going to be taking a look at how much does internet marketing cost as well as advice about how to conduct marketing on the internet in a cost-effective way.
So How Much Does Internet Marketing Cost?
Your internet marketing cost will vary due to a number of factors, first of all, it will depend on the ad platform that you use. Facebook runs one of the biggest ad platforms in the world, it costs on average between $0.50 and $2 for every click on your Facebook ads. While on Google’s ad networks which include Adsense and Youtube, the average cost per click is between \$1 and \$2.
It is key to note that this is just an average, the price of internet ads can dramatically increase depending on how specific the targeting is. To explain this better we will give an example, internet ads will be cheaper if you target the city of New York rather than targeting specific boroughs. The price will also rise if you decide to target just a specific gender, age, individuals that can speak a certain language as well as people that are passionate about cooking.
The competition around your target audience will also affect the overall pricing, for example in highly competitive industries such as insurance the average ad cost could be as high as $54.91 on the Google ad network.
How Can I Lower My Online Marketing Costs?
You have to be able to optimize your internet marketing campaigns if you want to boost your profitability. In this part of the article, we are going to be giving you some useful pointers on how to do this. It is important that you realize that cheap internet marketing is not always the best option for saving money, in fact, if you target individuals that you know will be most interested in your product you will get much higher conversion rates. Furthermore, the customers that you do attract will be much more interested in your services on average, so in the long term will be much more profitable.
Connected to the point above, you have to conduct research on what works the best, this type of testing is known as A/B testing. An aspect to this is the audience that you are targeting, you should run small marketing campaigns that target different groups which will allow you to see what is the most efficient way to run your ads. In fact, Google and Facebook award you for your research, as the better your targeting is the cheaper the cost per click as it is in their interest to show ads that their customers want to see.
Another type of research is to see which ad designs work the best, for example, minor changes such as a cake with an orange background may have better conversion and thus lower cost per click than the same cake with a yellow background. This also applies to the title or text of the advert, simple changes like this can have huge effects.
Is Internet Marketing the Future?
In the year 2000, it is estimated that just a few hundred million dollars were spent on internet marketing in a year, just twenty years later internet giants such as Google and Facebook are making tens of billions each from their internet ads alone. According to a study conducted by Small Biz Trends, people in the USA spend an average of 6.31 hours on the internet just on their phones. This is much larger than the average 4,16 hours that Americans spend watching television, a figure that is gradually shrinking with the young generation, for example, 18 to 34-year-olds that spend just 1.34 hours in front of the TV.
As you can see internet marketing is now an established way to market your business that will be around for the long term. You just have to keep focused on optimizing the prices for your needs and also make sure that you are always educating yourself about the fast-changing internet advertising scene.