Where to start?

Online advertising offers a number of tools with a wealth of opportunities, from driving online sales to growing awareness of your brand and products. However, before you embark on a digital campaign it is important to ask yourself “what do I want to achieve?”.

Once you know the answer to this question, you can then set an objective and build your online advertising campaign around it. This will allow you to narrow down the online advertising tools you need to use and inform the way you use them.

When you’ve decided your objective, you can then set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to judge the success of your campaign. These are goals or targets that tell you how well your online advertising campaign is working, such as the number of visitors to your site each month or how people have seen your display advertising.

Online advertising can be effective in many ways - it can help you to build your brand i.e. growing awareness of what you do and the product you offer. It is also one of the best ways to generate a direct response from consumers, such as making an online sale, directing people to your website or encouraging email sign-ups.

At the start of your planning process it is worth considering what your target audience is already doing online. The UK Online Measurement company (UKOM) is the IAB approved audience planning tool which can tell you who in the UK visits which websites, with detailed demographic information. This will help you to be more selective about where you want to advertise.

With all of this in place, you are ready to read ‘how online can help’ to start selecting the online advertising tools you’ll use.

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