Jacqui Boyd of Acceleration Media concludes a series of online education columns by telling marketers why now is a good time to climb into online media.

Online advertising has reached an inflection point in South Africa. To put it simply, there is no better time for marketers to take advantage of the many benefits that the online medium has to offer. Those that ignore the opportunity risk being left behind by the rest of the market.

Over the past two years, we've seen exponential growth in the number of unique browsers in South Africa. Research from Nielsen//NetRatings shows that there were 3.9-million active unique browsers in May 2007, up 121% from May 2005 (1.8-million).

During the same time frame, page impressions grew by 129% from 91-million to 207-million. For many middle-class South Africans, the internet is now an integral part of day to day life at home and at work, as a source of information and entertainment, and as a platform for social interaction.

The South African internet population is increasingly diverse, representing a healthy demographic spread. Users of both genders, of all ages, and representing a number of the countries languages are online at home or at work. Thanks to the advent of affordable broadband, these users are spending more time online than ever before.

If South Africa follows the trends evident in the rest of the world, we can expect to see online media continue its rapid rise while other media stagnate or decline in popularity. Increasingly, the web will become one of the best places to find and converse with your customers and prospects.

As this series of columns has shown online media allows you to interact with this audience in ways that are simply not possible in any other medium.

You can enter into a dialogue with a targeted audience rather than massbroadcasting a message in the hopes of reaching someone you want to talk to. You can understand how many people you are reaching with a campaign and who, which means that you can spend your budget where it will work the hardest for you.

You can use the online medium to further a range of business goals, from brand-building to customer conversion and retention, track your success in meeting your objectives using a range of powerful tools and metrics, and then adjust your campaign to make it perform better. The proven flexibility, cost-effectiveness, measurability and reach of online media make it an
essential part of the marketing mix for nearly any organisation.

The single biggest challenge that marketers face in the web environment lies in keeping ahead of a fast-changing market. The dynamics of the web are as fluid as ever, with new concepts like social networking reaching the market and sites falling in and out of popularity at a rapid rate.

There's no better time to start coming to grips with this dynamic environment and the many opportunities it has to offer. Jump in. There's no more time to waste.

Jacqui Boyd of Acceleration Media looks at the ways that companies should choose the correct online environments for their campaign.

Choosing the right vehicles for your advertisements can spell the difference between the success and failure of an offline campaign. The same principles of matching the right outlets to your advertisements to reach your audience apply in the online world.

Once you've set your business objectives and know what audiences you want to target, you can select the right portals to carry your advertisements. Many websites are able to give you fairly detailed information about the demographics and psychographics of their audiences that you can use to make your decisions, in addition to their traffic statistics.

This is all obvious stuff: just as you wouldn't advertise a Top 40 CD in a magazine that has a readership made up mostly of people over 50, you wouldn't place an advertisement for a new medical scheme for seniors on the 5FM website. But where online media once again comes into its own is in the flexibility it gives you to track how well various outlets are performing against a range of metrics and then make adjustments relatively quickly.

You can trace variables such as impressions served, clickthroughs, registrations for your site or newsletter and customer conversions to see how well your ad is performing in a particular environment. That gives you the flexibility to experiment with different outlets at low risk and cost.

Often, in advertising, the things that work well are not immediately obvious while those that should give you an excellent return produce disappointing results.

It might not seem intuitive to advertise a medical aid scheme on a travel site or an insurance product on a small entertainment portal, but the results might be spectacular. You might imagine that your product will sell best to men, but get surprisingly good conversion from a portal for women.

Conversely, the performance on a large general news portal might be disappointing because your ad is jostling with many others for attention or because the cost per conversion is too high because you're not reaching the right niche market.

In a print campaign, you might be tied into a non-performing outlet for months, but in online, it's usually easy to switch your spend to another, better-performing environment. As a rule of thumb, we advocate that our clients keep 70 to 80 percent of their spend with outlets that have performed well in the past and use 20 to 30 percent to experiment with sites that are new to them.

It's also worth remembering that the audience accesses global websites. You can use geo-targeting to reach South African users as they browse international sites such as CNN, Download.com, BBC, ESPN, MySpace and YouTube.

Another tip is to try and create synergy between your online and offline advertising campaigns. They can complement each other very well, provided you're using the right vehicles to reach your audience.

With websites rising to popularity, falling into obscurity and establishing themselves on a daily basis, the online media world is fluid (although there are some big portals like Google and Yahoo that anchor the industry), and advertisers need to be flexible and informed to keep up. The choices can be daunting, but picking the right outlets can produce great returns against
your advertising budget.

Diane Charton of Acceleration Media looks at the tools that marketers can use to aim their online advertising at their target audiences with pinpoint accuracy.

Over the past few months, I've looked at the ways that marketers can set the objectives for their online campaigns and track their success against these objectives using a range of sophisticated tools. The next piece of the puzzle is market segmentation and the powerful ways that online advertising allows you to reach your target market with minimal waste.

Online advertising allows you to learn and infer a wealth of information about your audience. You can easily determine information such as a user's browser type, IP address, and preferred language, which you can use to aim your ads at the most relevant users.

In some cases, you might have access to declared profile data about a site's registered users, giving you the ability to target your ads according to gender, age, income level, declared interests and other profile information.

You might even be able to access behavioural information, such as the sites that users recently visited, the ads they clicked on, and the searches they performed.

With some or all of this data in hand, you are able to reach your target market with tailored messaging and content that meets their needs while excluding users that are not part of your desired audience from your campaign. What this means in practice is that you can improve your clickthroughs and conversion rates by reaching users who are more likely to be interested in your product and service, while getting a lower cost per click than you would without targeting.

Geo-targeting - perhaps the most widely understood and used form of targeting -allows you to focus your ads on users from a certain country, region or even city, for example. Consider the fact, for example, that many of your target users may be found browsing international sites like Google, CNN, ESPN, MySpace and YouTube rather than the local portals.

You can reach them easily using geo-targeting. On the flipside of the coin, you might be an estate agent or tourism operator trying to reach European or American users who are interested in South Africa. What better place to reach them than on local property portals or news sites as they do their research?

But geo-targeting allows you to target more precisely than at country level.

You can target your ads at people from a certain city or region, which means that you can market your products more effectively within South Africa. Why, for example, waste ad budget serving an advert for a special in your Cape Town branch to Johannesburg-based users when you can target Capetonians alone?

Geo-targeting is just one of the many ways that you can target your ads.

Demographic, behavioural, day-parting (time of day), connection speed and operating system information can all be used to eliminate effort and money wasted on advertising to people who are not your core audience and to ensure that you talk to the right people in the right way (e.g. with the right messaging and home language).

The targeting methods that produce the best result will range from company to company and campaign to campaign. One caveat is that you should not focus so tightly on one audience that you end up excluding many potential customers - you should aim for focus and reach.

The trackability and measurability of online advertising means that you can measure your success easily and adjust your campaigns on the fly. You can measure and refine your campaign to bring it closer and closer to the balance of reach and targeting that meets your needs.

A couple of weeks ago, Jacqui Boyd and I were doing online media training at one of the agencies we work with, and were asked what we feel is the biggest challenge facing online in South Africa. Our response was unanimous and without hesitation: education. All the planners in the room agreed with us. They admitted that their knowledge of the online environment was very limited and that this prevented them from getting involved. Spending a couple of hours with them definitely helped, and started to show them that the online arena is by no means a scary place, but rather an exciting, dynamic and powerful one.

It is due to this experience that we have decided to set up a series of articles aimed at educating the market about the online offering and how it can add value to your marketing campaign. Throughout the course of the year, Jacqui and I will be writing about the various aspects of the online environment to hopefully give you a taste of what this powerful medium has to offer.

Now one thing we do realise is that this series is not necessarily for everyone. South Africa is certainly a place of extremes when it comes to the online environment. On one hand, we have a number of SA-based companies that are doing fantastic, very advanced work for the international market. Couple this with some marketers who are using the online arena very effectively and you have a group of people who are well-versed in the medium. To them, this series of articles may seem too simplistic and straightforward.

It is the other extreme that we are trying to reach. There is a large group of people who have an understanding of what online is – they’ve heard of Google in the press, they send and receive e-mails, subscribe to newsletters covering topics that interest them and use the web to search for news, weather, travel etc. Online is increasingly becoming a part of their everyday lives, yet they still lack the knowledge of how to harness the medium and begin to use it as a powerful tool that adds value to their businesses.

If you’re part of this group, we’re hoping that this series of articles will begin to highlight the real benefits of online and how you can integrate these into your messaging matrix to create powerful, well-rounded and effective campaigns. We’re hoping that we can pique your interest and encourage you to explore and test this medium.

In the series we will cover a range of topics, starting with a basic introduction to the online arena and how things look right now - both here in SA as well as internationally – and where we anticipate this heading. We will look at how people have effectively integrated online into their broader marketing mix and how this integrated approach can be utilised. We’ll show you some real examples of work done both locally and abroad and the results achieved. We’ll take you through the different ways of approaching online and strategising a campaign. We’ll explore the many avenues that are available and how best to use and tie them back to your overall marketing objectives. We’ll discuss various tactics, different ways to buy online and how best to monetise these investments. Throughout the course we will continually tie this back to the benefits of online, what value it delivers and the types of insights an online campaign can give you.

We welcome any feedback that can make this series work harder for you. We are hoping that through this process we can develop a powerful education tool that will highlight the benefits and open up the exciting online environment for you.

Diane Charton examines how companies can match their business objectives with specific online marketing models and strategies.

One of the recurring themes in this series of columns is how online media offers marketers a range of powerful and sophisticated tools and metrics for measuring the success of their campaigns.

This month, I'm taking a step back to discuss how you establish the business objectives that will determine your metrics for success, as well as the online marketing models that you can match with particular marketing goals.

Every business has the ultimate goal of making more money - growing revenues and profits. Marketers support this goal by rolling out campaigns and strategies that meet one (or more) of three secondary goals: increasing brand awareness; driving direct sales; and generating sales leads.

Once you know which of these three goals you want to pursue, online marketing offers a range of tools, methodologies, pricing models and strategies that you can use to pursue your strategy and measure your return on investment.

There is no "one size fits all" solution since each will have its own nuances and complexities. Armed with the understanding of your goals and what online can do to help you meet them, you can start looking at the strategy for your campaign.

The first step is to ask yourself how well you are equipped to support your goals with the online infrastructure you have at your disposal. If you want people to buy online (direct sales), do you have a stable and secure online shopping environment? If you want to generate leads, have you made it easy for users to fill in your forms?

Not every business is able to conduct an online sale or collect data, but nearly every business can use online for brand-building campaigns. As with many offline campaigns the goal will be to reach as much of the relevant target market as possible with the brand message.

For a brand-building exercise, a banner campaign that focuses on generating large volumes in an environment relevant to the target market might produce the best returns. Here, a company would look at buying display ads on a CPM - or cost per thousand - basis. Essentially, the advertiser pays for a message to be exposed to a specific audience and is charged a certain amount of money for every thousand impressions (every thousand times the ad is shown to a user browsing the web site).

The way this differs from the offline advertising world is that you pay only for the ads that are served. The measurability of the medium means that one pays for the actual impressions rather than the impressions that were promised by the publisher.

Online marketing becomes particularly exciting for companies that have a strong online environment that allows them to measure the results of a campaign and its return on investment. You can look beyond the CPM model and banner ads to other pricing models that are based on end-users taking actions that meet your goals.

For example, if you want to drive people to your web site, you can negotiate a cost per click (CPC) deal where you pay the publisher for the clickthroughs you get (users who follow the ad to the advertiser's web site), irrespective of how many users see the ad. This approach is often used in search engine marketing.

An even more interesting approach could allow you to tie your online spending directly to user actions that are linked to revenue generation, such as a user visiting your e-commerce site and buying something (CPA - cost per action), or filling in one of your web forms (CPL - cost per lead).

A CPM campaign needs to be run first to gain an understanding of the market and work out the value of the "A" or "L" in the above two deals. The resulting pricing model needs to be fair to the publisher and the client to ensure that both parties meet their objectives.

One company that wants to drive sales (of airline tickets, for example) might find a CPA model to deliver the best value, while another trying to build a database of prospects (like a mortgage originator) might benefit most from the CPL approach. In these models, every action and every optimisation can be linked to the business goal, ensuring that wasted
spend is reduced and that one pays only for the actions that resulted in a tangible benefit like a lead or a sale.

Companies that want to enjoy the maximum benefit from online advertising need to familiarise themselves with the options and learn which work best for certain campaigns. Adopting the right model for one's business objectives is critical to the success of a campaign. Once you know what your objectives are and have chosen the strategy that will help you meet them, you can measure your success against clear benchmarks.

We identified measurability and trackability as significant benefits of online advertising in part 2 of this series. This month, we look at the metrics that companies can use to measure their online campaigns and how they can use this information to improve return on investment.

Measuring return on investment from ad campaigns has always been an inexact science, involving focus groups, customer surveys, inference and a lot of guesswork.

Imagine, then, if you could get data not only about how many people buy a magazine with your ad in it, but also accurate and timely information about how many actually read the creative, respond to the call to action and eventually buy a product or service from you.

You would know which magazines and adverts are producing the best results for you, how customers are interacting with your sales reps and call centre, and where the road bumps are in your customer conversion process. Best of all, you'd be able to use all the data at your information to fine-tune your messaging and create ads that help you to capture sales.

Of course, this is a pipe dream in the world of traditional media, but it is a reality for companies that have mastered online advertising. The online channel gives marketers a set of tools that they can use to track their campaigns in close to real time and get precise measurements about just how effective their adverts are.

Most companies know that they can track how many times their ads are shown to viewers - the number of impressions that are served - and how many of these impressions are served to unique users. But that is only the beginning since there is a wealth of interesting data to be gathered after the ad is served.

You can track the user's interactions with your company from the moment that the ad is served right up to the conclusion of an online sale using a range of metrics for precise measurement of ROI against the objectives of the campaign.

From the outset, you can look at how many people clicked on the ad and compare it to the number of times the ad was served. That gives you the click-through rate (CTR), which gives you an insight into how well people have responded to your ad's messaging.

You can compare the CTR you gained from different creative, different Web sites and different placements within specific Web sites. Once you know where people are coming from, when they click your ad, and what messages they are responding to, you can fine-tune your creative and placements to get the best possible response.

You can even monitor how many people saw an ad, didn't click on it immediately but made their way to the site within 30 days to measure branding awareness in addition to direct response.

As users land on your Web site after clicking on the ad, you can track their behaviour and see whether they sign up for the letter, enter the competition, apply for a service or make an online purchase, depending on your campaign objectives. We can go so far as to track the exact amount a particular sale was worth and then tie it back to the environment and ad that brought the user to the Web site.

As a result, you can track placement and creative to see not only which give you the most traffic, but also which provide you with the most valuable traffic.

This information allows you to optimise your future campaigns to get the mix of traffic and users you are looking for. There is one caveat: make sure that the tracking costs have been included and itemised in your campaign total with your service provider so that there are no surprises.

Ad tracking is a vital element of every online campaign. Every marketer embarking on an online campaign should demand it. Understand upfront what your objectives are and how your campaigns can be benchmarked against them, and you will enjoy a superior return on your advertising investment.

Africans accessed OPA member sites each month in the third quarter of 2006, in comparison with 2.4-million in the second quarter.

Sure, it's only a small percentage of the South African population, but it is also the part of the audience that many advertisers really want to reach.

The average South African net user is youthful (59% are younger than 35), well-educated (79% have some tertiary education) and prosperous (39% have an annual household income of more than R150,000).

Many of these people have reduced their consumption of newspapers and other traditional media in favour of the internet to meet their communications, entertainment and news needs. More South Africans can be expected to join this pool of users as high-speed internet connections become more affordable and common.

Now that I've established that there is an online audience in South Africa worth addressing, I'll turn to the reasons why it is worth using the online channel to talk to them.

Online marketing allows you - the marketer - to start a meaningful dialogue with your customer - and that is perhaps the single biggest benefit the online channel offers. No other advertising channel allows you to listen to your customer as closely and then respond as quickly to his or her needs as online does.

Online gives you a host of tools that you can use to understand and listen to your audience - from site analytics through to online advertising and email marketing. Once you've opened a dialogue with your user, you're in a strong position to convert him or her from a prospect into a customer or from a first time buyer into a loyal, repeat customer.

A related advantage of the online channel is that it is measurable and accountable. Unlike broadcast or print, it gives you a set of metrics that you can use to get very precise measurements of the ROI you are reaping from your ad-spend.

It's easy to understand how many people you are reaching with a campaign, as well as how effective your campaign is in achieving customer conversions.

That allows you to spend your money effectively and efficiently rather than blanketing the market with ads and hoping for the best. You can implement a cost-effective campaign targeting a niche market as easily as you can roll out a series of high profile ads on one of the big websites.

Online marketing is also flexible, and as good for brand-building campaigns as it is for customer acquisition. It's true that online marketing shines as a tool for customer acquisition for online businesses, but many companies that don't offer online shopping and services have also reaped strong ROI from branding campaigns run on the web.

In short, online is a channel that no South African advertiser who wants to reach middle and higher income families can afford to ignore as part of its marketing mix. If you're not at least experimenting with online to see what it can do for you, you risk getting left behind by your audience in the years to come.