WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONVENTIONAL AND INTERNET ADS?
by Vern Clinton
So, what’s the big deal about getting business from your website? Why is it different than any other type of advertising?
Non-internet advertising lives in an environment of eyeballs and ears. Radio broadcasts, television programs, magazines, newspapers, flyer handouts, billboards, public benches, etc.
If this non-Internet advertising is well designed and thought out some of the people who listen to the radio program will hear your message, some of the people watching the television program will not go get a snack during the commercial break and might see your ad. Some might notice your ad in the newspaper or on the park bench, etc. However, you can be sure that their purpose in listening to the radio or watching television or reading the paper was not to see your ad. Your ad has to first interrupt what they really want to do and grab their attention. In the advertising business that is “getting eyeballs”. If your ad doesn’t catch the audience’s attention in that fleeting moment, the ad is wasted.
Your website, on the other hand, lives as an invisible collection of electrons on a small corner of the hard drive of a computer that is tucked away with dozens or hundreds of other computers on racks in an Internet service provider’s back room.
Your website might be beautiful, attractive, well thought out, full of information, but there are no prospects to see it on that obscure computer in the back room of the service provider. There are no drive-by prospects, no readers of some article whose eyeballs you can catch with your graphics or audio message. Your site is just an invisible cloud of electrons of no use to anybody until something extraordinary happens.
Someone must make a specific request of the ISP’s computer to deliver a visibly rendered version of your webpage to their computer screen. This prospective customer has to be precise and specific. Their request to that computer has to say in effect: “Out of all of the billions of web pages in existence on the Internet I want to see the one called http://www.lotsawidgets.com/greatwidgets.htm. Until that event your site is invisible to human eyes. It doesn’t matter that you paid $10,000 for a beautiful animated graphic or that you had a talented writer compose your advertising message or that you have the most attractive pricing in the country for your widgets, NO ONE will see it without another most extraordinary event happening.
One gollem-like entity must stumble upon your cloud of electrons and be able to see it. That’s a search engine ‘robot’, a mindless computer program that prowls every computer on the Internet that is hosting web pages. When it finds your web page it puts the information in a search engine database. The robot can’t see your graphics, it doesn’t judge the literary organization of your message, it simply records the words on each page, including some invisible words in the coding behind the visible page. The body of words that it does record in its database is then linked to other information it discovers about your page like how many other sites have links to that page and what words and phrases in those other pages are relevant to your page, how long the page been on the Internet, etc.
Hours or days or weeks later a search engine program organizes all that information about your page and assigns it ‘rank’ or ‘strength’ which it will later use to compare your page with other pages with the same or similar collections of words. Now, when a prospect asks the search engine to find them pages that deal with their interest in Widgets, the search engine draws on all this information to deliver thousands of links to them. Your page will be in there somewhere. Depending on what the search engine has decided about the strength and relevance of your page you will have a ‘position’. The position will be for the ‘keyword’ the prospect used and may be anywhere from #1 to #10,000,000 or higher.
That searching prospect will start at page one of the thousands of pages presented to investigate the links. If yours is in the first 2 or so pages of links they may take a look at your page about Widgets. If by some miracle after all of this they do end up with your web page on their computer screen, then and only then will the visible appearance of your page get the chance to capture their attention before they move on to the next link on their list. So another most extraordinary event must happen within a couple of seconds.
You don’t have to distract this visitor from some other activity. They did not come to your page because they were driving by on the freeway and saw a blaring ad on a billboard, nor were they listening to the radio to your message about widgets, did they turn a magazine page and have their attention captured by a picture of a beautiful Widget on the endangered species list. No, they are at your page because they asked specifically to see it because of their interest in Widgets. They are there at that moment to check you out. The extraordinary event is that they must in a couple of seconds decide that your web page of all of the thousands they can access is the one to spend more of their valuable time on. If they do that then another most extraordinary event must happen.
Your web page must deliver on its promise that it has the specific information your prospect wants. The visible website takes over and the web design is the critical factor in whether you gain a customer or client or whether that prospect is disappointed and goes away forever.
Related Links: Benefits of Internet Marketing
