Why Your Online Advertising Needs To Be Targeted

Writen by Donny Lowy

Many new comers to the Internet business believe that the degree to their success is related to the level of traffic they can bring to their sites.

There is truth in this sentiment, but it must be molded by the actual experience of doing business online.

Bringing visitors to a web site is necessary to producing sales.

After all, it is these visitors who will be transacting business with the site.

Every business owner would agree that the higher the number of potential customers who interact with his business, the higher the number of sales will be.

But it is in this statement that an important Internet truth is touched on.

The number of visitors to a site is only beneficial according to the need of these visitors for the site's offerings.

Interested visitors will respond to a site's offering, while visitors who have no affinity for the site's offering will simply move on.

Website owners need to ensure that the traffic that they are receiving is comprised of individuals who have an interest in the market segment being covered.

Targeted advertising comes into play here.

For a site to be successful it must attract targeted traffic. The visitors that see the site must have an expressed interest in the products and services being offered.

Most spam emails are simply deleted because the recipient has no affinity to the product or service being offered.

On the other hand, medical ads that appear in online medical trade journals have a very high response rate because visitors have a clear interest in the medical field.

Effective online advertising is based on matching the ad, or site, to people who are already interested in the products and services being offered.

From a mathematical point of view, it is easier to produce sales from targeted traffic than from generic visitors.

Let's assume that 1 out of 100 overweight people will buy a diet book today. If they see your ad, you have a chance of capturing 1 sale per every 100 visitors you receive from this market segment.

Now let's say that in a random group of 100 people 30 will be overweight.

So you need 330 generic visitors to attract 100 overweight visitors.

This means that you need over three times as much generic traffic to gain a sale than from targeted traffic.

It is for this reason that successful online businesses use targeted traffic in their campaigns.

The only exception to this rule is when you can bring in an overwhelming amount of traffic without breaking your budget.

An exception using the above example would be when you can bring in those 330 random visitors for less than the cost of bringing in those 100 targeted visitors.

You would actually need more than 330 random visitors to make room for the odds of there being less than 30% overweight visitors arriving to your site.

Donny Lowy has set up http://www.billionfreeads.com to show entrepreneurs how to advertise for free.