I wonder if anyone had any experience of online adverts and what kind of success rate they'd had.

I've got a big promotion coming up with a few websites and wondered if anyone else had any experiences, good or bad?

i don't think i've ever clicked on an online ad and only buy online when there really is no other alternative

I was thinking more along the lines of promotional material, rather than web links.

I don't think web clicky links are the way forward at all. But if you can get your adverts in the way of promotional material in magazines, there must be some merit to that?

I used to work for a name-brand budget holiday company and Google adwords accounted for a very considerable proportion of the online sales (as opposed to natural searches, recurring customers and print media crossover)

If you get the right search keywords and aren't afraid to pay a bit for decent search keywords, you can get a decent bit of business out of it. I'm a little confused though; what kind of "promotional material" do you mean, if not links?

If you are looking at costs per lead then a report (US Bancorp Piper) came out recently that showed search engine marketing was the cheapest with email marketing the same. Then came yellow pages and then banner advertising with direct mail marketing the most expensive.

Alot depends on the product or service you are trying to make people aware of and whether they are likely to look at websites or traditional media.

What are your products or services?

they do not give you much

If you would like me to set up a Google Ads campaign for you I can give you a voucher for £30 worth of FREE advertising.

I have a few vouchers left which expire 30 November 2009.

Half a day should be enough to get started.

If done properly web advertising can be very effective and deliver great ROI. Online advertising surpassed tv advertising this year so people are realising its potential.

Beware though if PPC is done incorrectly it can be extremely costly due to the amounts of traffic it can generate.

Banner advertising can be very effective in gaining good exposure because while people may not click on your ad they will see it and could well remember your name later on so its not all bad news if you don't get clicks.

Why not set up a Facebook fan page or Twitter account - you can then keep people up to date on your business for free?

web promotion?
do your promotion in the ways of passages, messages... whatever, not in ads. for example, a passage is a story with a link in it and the link is the continuance of your story.
there are many ways to do this:
blog marketing, forum marketing.
anyway , do it in the way people can and will click into, not pure ads that may be hated by most people.

I find that you have to make the effort to follow up every potential bit of interest that you have, so make sure that you plan well in advance to have a set regime of how you will contact each and every person that clicks.

Adwords can be very expensive. If you aren't careful you can end up spending alot of money for little or no return.

I just ran a campaign for Replica Golf Trophies in the U.S. I spent in total £22.50 with over 100 clicks for exact match keywords.

Over 3 days I've had 6 orders making a profit of £300. It all depends on what you are trying to advertise and whether people looking for that product or service use Search Engines (SE's) to find it.

You can use services like wordtracker to find what people type into all SE's each month although it doesn't break it down into searches for each of the main SE's.

Don't go mad thinking you want to drive loads of traffic to your site. You don't. You want to minimise incorrect clickthroughs. What you want is paying customers.

Think about your keywords, if you are selling bone china, you don't want to be paying for all the clicks you will get from people looking for holidays to china, china tea etc.

Thats a great example china as a single keyword would be suicide. Two words as a key phrase is better but costs the most per click. Three and Four word "key phrases" are better value for money although you wont get as many clicks but the quality of the click throughs will be much better.

Try not to use broad match terms, use " " or [] arounnd your keywords or if you do use broad match list some negative keywords like

-tea or -holidays

If you can get a feature like a fashion spread in Heat or something I would imagine that is good but a print advert is no good for driving traffic to a website.

Think about what is involved to get a print advert to lead to the desired outcome (paying customer)

1) They have to notice the advert
2) They have to be interested enough to read the advert
3) They have to remember the URL
4) They have to physically type in the URL correctly when they're next at a computer

and that's just to see your site - then you've got all the issues of conversion once you have a site visitor - but there are five steps before they even get there.

The respeonse rate to print adverts is IIRC about 2%, but you have to pay for the other 98% too. With pay per click you only pay for people who actually do what you want, which is to click your link.

Can I ask folk to please not take advantage of threads like this by dropping links back to your own website where it's not directly relevant to the OP's question.