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November 2008

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Targeting online advertising with the big guys

Targeted Online Advertising With The Big Guys

Targeted online advertising has made leaps and bounds over the past few years and Google and Yahoo! are dominating. While both are clear leaders in Internet advertising, they have each taken a different approach. Advertising through either, or both, can give a high return on investment for many chiropractic practices.

Google has the upper hand in search marketing through its ad platform, Google Adwords and its search engine dominance, but Yahoo!’s new “APT” is taking a different approach, using its vast network of partners to connect businesses with potential clients.

Google Adwords uses Google’s near search engine monopoly to show ads to users based on keywords and geography. As a user types in the word or words they are searching for, Google matches those words to keywords set by you. Their “Keyword Tool” even enables you to find the keywords that will be most effective for your practice, along with how much competition from other advertisers there is. Once a user types in one of your keywords, they see your ad, created by you, next to their search results.

Along with specifying the key words that connect potential patients to your ads, you can also set your ad to appear only to people within a specified state, city or region. You have the option to target Google users that are within, for example, 50 miles your location. When those users click on Google Maps, your location, contact info and a picture selected by you, appear on the map.

Adwords also give you the capability of controlling the amount you spend on advertising with Google’s pay-per-click feature; you only pay for the customers that click on your ad. It allows you to set a maximum budget of, say, five dollars per day at a rate of no more than 10 cents per click.

To determine how effective your advertising is, Google provides keyword traffic and cost estimates so that you can determine which keywords are working the best and how to maximize your budget. As Google's vice president of Business Development and Sales Omid Kordestani explains, "Google has worked closely with advertisers to design and build a program to produce superior

targeting and optimal ad performance for online campaigns. From fine-tuning the way advertisers target their audiences to helping advertisers deliver a precise message, Google works in tandem with its advertisers to deliver highly effective results."

On the other side of the coin, Yahoo! has taken a different approach with their new advertising platform, APT. APT, which was just launched last September, is a “unified digital advertising platform” that takes advantage of unique partnerships, among other aspects, to help advertisers target specific audiences.

“One of the major benefits of APT from Yahoo!,” says Sue Decker, President of Yahoo!, “is the fact that it’s an open system, designed to enable advertisers to reach their audiences in their favorite places across the web.” The “favorite places” that Decker refers to are the partners that Yahoo! has allied with, including the WebMD family of sites, eBay, Forbes and the newspaper consortium. APT is also unique in that it allows you to place display ads, or graphical banner ads on Yahoo!’s network of sites, something lacking from Google’s text-only search marketing.

In the case of DCs, WebMD is one of Yahoo!’s most useful partners. As the leader in online medical traffic, WebMD continues to grow and attract a more diverse group of users. In the third quarter of 2008, WebMD attracted 49 million users monthly, an increase of twenty percent from the previous quarter.

On the local level, Yahoo!’s partnership with the newspaper consortium, a group of over 784 local newspapers, allows you the opportunity to reach even more potential patients. Using APT puts your practice on local newspapers’ websites that you choose, expanding your local advertising network.

As George Irish, President of Hurst Newspapers explains, “With this next-generation platform we can realize the powerful combination of Yahoo!’s technology innovations, national reach and partner network with the consortium’s rich local content, sales forces and local marketing expertise.”

So, when choosing where to advertise online, the most important question is whether or not you will be able to reach your targeted audience. The only question that remains is…

Which one is right for your practice?

Blake Gill is freelance writer and regular contributer to ChiroEco.com. He can be reached at blakefgill@gmail.com.