Many retail stores do not understand the differences between the Internet as an advertising medium and the other traditional advertising mediums, such as TV, newspaper and radio. Each can help build awareness and improve your customer marketing reach, but that is where the similarities ends.

When you place an ad in a local newspaper or in the Yellow Pages it is a static ad and cannot be easily changed, nor can you interact directly with the readers. Internet advertising on the other hand is much more creative and trackable.

Today, you can target specific geographic areas with your online advertisements on the major search engines (called geo-targeting). This means only people within your defined geographic area will see your advertisement. If the ad is written well the targeted shoppers ready to buy your products and services will see and click on your ad. So now we can see exactly how many people viewed your ad versus how many people actually clicked on the ad and went to your web site.

If your web site includes some interactive, landing pages such as: request an appointment page, a print this coupon page, shop-at-home page, etc... we can also track how many people use these pages as well. This helps us measure the performance of each Call to Action page.

In other words, we can measure the performance of Internet advertising much easier than we can with radio, newspaper or television. We can also quickly and easily modify the landing pages to help improve the results when needed.

Pay-Per-Click advertising can be geo-targeted to a specific geographic area. Your ad will only appear to those people searching within the targeted geographic area and where your keywords are relevant to the search term. Also, you only pay a bid fee when someone actually clicks on your sponsored link within your ad.

Let's say you bid $1.50 on the keyword "carpet" and geo-targeted "Chicago, IL.". Only people searching for carpet in the Chicago area will see your advertisement. If your ad appeared 1000 times in a day (this is called ad impressions) but only 6 people clicked on your ad you would only pay: 6 x $1.50 = $9.00.