Ready to get your feet wet in paid promotions like search engine marketing and display advertising? Not sure where to start? Check out Pagemodo's Getting Started Guide, complete with a glossary of terms, Paid Promotion Checklist, and advice for measuring your results.

1. Paid Promotions:
A Getting Started Guide for Small Businesses

2. Paid promotions and online advertising are a great way for small
businesses to increase their brand exposure and drive more traffic
to their websites.

3. ?
So why aren’t more small business owners
taking advantage of this tactic?

4. ?
So why aren’t more small business owners
taking advantage of this tactic?
1. Budget Limitations
2. Intimidation

5. Small businesses have small budgets.
As a result, they tend to lean towards low-cost solutions like Search
Engine Optimization and social media marketing, instead.

6. Some business owners hold off on paid
promotions because they don’t feel
confident jumping in.
The good news is, we can help with this one! Click on to learn
everything you need to know to get started with paid promotion
today.

7. Glossary of Terms
PPC: Pay Per Click • SEM: Search Engine Marketing • CPC: Cost Per Click
CTR: Click Through Rate • CPM: Cost Per (1000) Impression(s)
CPL/CPA: Cost Per Lead/Cost Per Acquisition • Display Advertising
Destination URL/Landing Page • Conversion • Impressions
Campaign Reach • Facebook Ads • Custom Audience

8. Glossary of Terms
PPC: Pay Per Click
This term describes a cost structure used by many common
advertising networks in which the advertiser only pays when their
ad is actually acted on. This helps advertisers manage their budgets
successfully

9. Glossary of Terms
SEM: Search Engine Marketing
Although this term technically does refer to both paid search engine
advertising as well as organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
most in the industry use SEM interchangeably with “paid search”.
These are the ads the show up above and beside organic search
results on sites like Google.

10. Glossary of Terms
CPC: Cost Per Click
This is the rate at which you are charged for the clicks on your ads.
This will vary by search engine, network, or platform, and is usually
based on the top price or bid you enter that you’re willing to pay for
each click, and is affected by the other top competitors.

11. Glossary of Terms
CTR: Click Through Rate
This can be found be dividing the number of impressions by the
number of clicks. Or, the rate at which the people who saw your ad
actually clicked on it. If you have a high click through rate, you know
you’ve got an effective ad. If the rate is low, you might want to
reassess the copy, imagery, and subject of your ad, as well as the
audience to which you are serving it.

12. Glossary of Terms
CPM: Cost Per (1000) Impression(s)
As opposed to Cost Per Click, this pay structure measure refers to
the cost you pay per every 1000 impressions (views) your ad gets.

13. Glossary of Terms
CPL/CPA: Cost Per Lead/Cost Per
Acquisition
Depending on the goal of your campaign, you may measure either
of these things. If your goal is to obtain leads (customer contact
information that you can use in the future) that would count as an
‘acquisition’ for you. However if your goal is to get people to
purchase something, you’d only be counting the actual acquisition.

14. Glossary of Terms
Display Advertising:
In the online sense of the term, this refers to advertisements that
appear throughout the web (social media sites, other websites) and
usually include copy, a graphic, and link to a website.

15. Glossary of Terms
Destination URL/Landing Page:
This is the link that your ad directs people to when they click on it.
This can be a website’s homepage, a particular page or article on a
site, a social media profile, or a landing page that was created
specifically for the ad in question to direct to. This is a good way to
control the analytics of a certain ad – if the only traffic to that page
is coming from an ad, it’s easy to get insights about those visitors
and the success of the campaign.

16. Glossary of Terms
Conversion:
Depending on the goals of your campaign, a conversion can mean
many different things. If your goal was to get someone to visit a
landing page and fill out a form, your ‘conversion’ is counted when
that email address is captured. If your goal is to have someone
purchase a product from your web store, the conversion won’t be
counted until they check out.

17. Glossary of Terms
Impressions:
The number of times that your advertisement is seen by the
selected audience. This does not require that they click to be
counted, only that it’s served up to them.

18. Glossary of Terms
Campaign Reach:
The number of unique viewers who saw your advertisement
(usually used by Facebook).

19. Glossary of Terms
Facebook Ads:
These can take a number of forms, showing up in the user’s news
feed, or down the right hand side of their browser, or in their
mobile news feed. They often link to the advertiser’s Facebook
page, but can certainly have a destination URL that is a website or
landing page as well.

20. Glossary of Terms
Custom Audience:
A relatively new option on Facebook, this ad strategy allows you to
upload a list of email addresses you have collected in your database
to Facebook and serve ads to the people on that list who have
Facebook profiles. This is a great way to target your most engaged
potential customers.

21. Now that you know the lingo, you’re almost
ready to start your first campaign.
As with every marketing strategy, the first step is a great plan. Run
through this paid promotion checklist and set yourself up for success.

22. Paid Promotion Checklist

23. Step 1: Identify Your Goals
Step 6: Pick A Landing Page
Step 2: Identify Your Audience
Step 7: Choose A Provider
Step 3: Choose Your Media
Step 8: Monitor Your Progress
Step 4: Set Your Budget
Step 9: Analyze The Results
Step 5: Prepare Your Assets
Step 10: Take Notes, Make Plans

24. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 1: Identify Your Goals
It will be hard to gauge the success of your paid promotion if you
don’t first determine your goals for the campaign. Do you want to
drive more traffic to your website? Get more likes on Facebook?
Increase awareness of your brand? Make a note before you get
started.

25. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 2: Identify Your Audience
This is an off-shoot of something you probably have already done
for your business – identifying the ideal customer for you and
thinking about how you speak to them. The audience you choose
for your paid promotions may be the same general audience, or
perhaps a subset of that audience. For example, instead of
women with college degrees in the Washington, DC area, your
campaign might target women with college degrees in the
Washington, DC area who are between the ages of 25 and 35.

26. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 3: Choose Your Media
This is the part where you decide how you’ll best read the audience
you identified above. Should you try Facebook advertising? Maybe
display ads on specific websites they might visit? Or perhaps search
engine marketing (SEM) is the best vehicle for your message. The
answer depends on the answers to ‘what’ and ‘whom’ that you
determined above.

27. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 4: Set Your Budget
The cost and pricing structures vary across digital promotion types,
and you’ll often have options for how you’d like to pay within one
medium. For example, you can choose today pay per click, or pay
per impression (or 1,000 impressions, technically). So depending on
the money you have set aside for this, and the goal of your
promotion, you’ll need to choose the one that fits you best.

28. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 5: Prepare Your Assets
Whether you choose display advertising on websites, Facebook
advertising, or search engine marketing, there are certain creative
assets you’ll need. Prepare the images you might use, logos, coupon
or offer codes, and the copy (text) in this step so you have easily
access it as you’re creating your promotions.

29. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 6: Pick A Landing Page
One of the things that your ads will include is a link to…something.
It’s up to you to decide what it is. Again, this will be determined by
the goal of your campaign, but choices include your website’s home
page, a certain product in your web store, your Facebook page, or a
dedicated landing page you create on your website just for this
purpose.

30. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 7: Choose A Provider
Depending on the type of ad you want to run, you have some
options for providers. These include Google for SEM, Facebook for,
well, Facebook, and BuySellAds.com for display advertising on
websites. There are lots of options out there though, so a little
research and pick the one that’s best for your purposes, goals, and
budget.

31. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 8: Monitor Your Progress
Once you start your campaign, most providers will offer some kind
of insights tool to help you track the success of your campaign.
Many will also allow you to make tweaks to the message, creative,
or audience as you go along so you can optimize your results if you
see something that’s not working.

32. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 9: Analyze The Results
Using an analytics tool like Google Analytics or Stats (if you have a
Webs website), you can easily see the effect your paid promotion
had on your website. If you ran a promotion solely for social media,
you can check your metrics with Facebook Insights, but hopefully you’ll also see some more referrals from Facebook back to your
website if traffic on social media increased significantly. Did you get
more traffic to your homepage? To specific page on your site? Did
anyone redeem offer codes? Did you sell more of a certain product?

33. Paid Promotion Checklist
Step 10: Take Notes, Make Plans
Once you’ve collected your insights and analytics, it’s time to assess
the overall success of your campaign and decide if it’s a tactic you
should include in your small business’s marketing plan going
forward. Measuring the success of paid promotions depends on
several factors, including your goals, your budget, the lifetime value
of new customers, and the cost to acquire each one. You can learn
more about the formulas involved in these calculations in the article
link above.

34. Measuring Results

35. The often-overlooked final step of any
successful marketing campaign is to measure
the results. Do yourself a favor and figure out
how you’re going to measure success before
you even get started. When you’re done
evaluate your results and determine if paid
promotion is the right tactic for you!

36. Measuring Results
1. Determine the Value of Your Average
Customer
The first step in judging paid promotion success is understanding
the value of your average customer. For someone who buys your
product or service, what is the average order value? What percent
of customers order again in the future?
Let’s say your average customer order is $100 and 50% of customers
reorder at the same average order size of $100. Your average
customer would be worth $150 = $100 + (50% X $100).

37. Measuring Results
2. Track the Traffic That Your Social
Campaign is Generating for Your Business
There are several ways that you can determine how much social
traffic you are driving with a paid promotion. One of the easiest is
to extend a special offer through your social channels that can be
redeemed with a specific code or phrase.
For example, if you’re a florist and want to track traffic generated by
a social media promotion on mother’s day, offer a 10% discount for
customers who use the promo code “MOM2014” on your website or
at your physical store. After the promotion ends, you’ll be able to
total up all of the purchases that were generated.

38. Measuring Results
3. Compare Earnings and Expenses
The final step of determining success is comparing how much you
earned with the promotion to how much you spent in social media
advertising.
Earnings: Average Customer Value X Number of Customers
Expenses: Social Media Advertising Expense + Any Discounts or
Free Giveaways
A good rule of thumb for any campaign is to have your Earnings
greater than twice your Expenses. This builds in a margin of error
for the above calculations and provides more confidence that social
media truly is working for your business!

39. Now that you have all the tools you need
to run a successful paid promotion
campaign, it’s time to dive in.
Good luck!

40. Want more tools for creating a
great presence for your business
all over the Web?
Visit www.Pagemodo.com.