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In marketing, saturating the market with your message ensures you’re in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Whether it’s buying ads during the Super Bowl or sponsoring a show to feature your brand during the hour or half-hour it’s on, most big advertisers are cognizant of getting the most “bang” for their buck by purchasing time slots and placements that maximize exposure.

Online marketing is no different, and in competitive markets, saturation can be a challenge. Here are some tips to ensure you’re controlling as many spaces on a page as possible.

First, let’s define how many spots are available. For any given query, Google will return 10 organic listings and approximately 11 paid listings. That’s, on average, 22 opportunities for you to gain or lose a click.

Your job, as someone who wants to control the market for that query, is to place yourself in as many spaces as possible. There are a few ways to do that.

Read the entire article at Search Engine Watch.

With millions of Internet users spending their time and money on the web, contextual advertising appears to be a really attractive alternative to offline marketing. The best thing about contextual advertising is that online ads are placed on the sites with relevant content, so that visitors are more likely to click the ad, buy the product or even become repeat customers. So, how does it all work?

Contextual advertising systems scan a web page for some specific keywords and then display the ads related to that page. Contextual ads can also be placed on the search engine result pages which are relevant to the search topic. This way contextual advertising makes it possible to distribute your company’s brand across numerous web pages.

Contextual advertising offers a multitude of advantages. It allows advertisers to reach their target audience and drive massive traffic to the website. The vast majority of contextual advertising providers use pay per click (PPC) systems, meaning you pay only if your ad has been clicked. Another big advantage of contextual advertisements is that they’re less annoying in comparison with pop-up ads or huge banners. If the information you provide is helpful, the chances are the visitor will become your loyal customer or recommend your site to friends or co-workers.

Read more from Ecommerce Journal.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is pushing for a second act.

The company has built its fortune almost entirely on the back of small text ads, which appear alongside its search results and on sites across the Web. Now it is stepping up efforts to make inroads into graphical display ads, a business long dominated by Yahoo.

On Friday, the company plans to introduce a long-awaited new version of an ad exchange, like a stock market, where advertisers and publishers can buy and sell advertising space, filling spots in Web pages on the fly.

Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, has said repeatedly that display advertising offers one of the company’s best prospects for expansion, now that growth in its text ad business has slowed significantly. The new advertising exchange is a cornerstone of Google’s display strategy, and one of the main reasons Google bought the ad company DoubleClick last year for $3.1 billion.

More from The New York Times.

Print will lose even more US ad spending share than previously forecast but remain on top, while online is set to grab the second-largest slice of the ad spending pie this year, according to estimates by Myers Publishing.

2009 will be the first year that ad spending online is greater than local and national spot TV, with online expenditures rising from 10.6% of the total in 2008 to 12.2% this year. The rise in market share will occur despite a 0.5% drop in spending forecast for online in 2009, to $24.55 billion.

Read more from eMarketer.com.

An owner/manager of a restaurant or bar might well know that unless somebody is searching specifically for the eatery of choice, general search terms related to one’s establishment can be a challenge to hold in page results. Pick a city and and a generic request like “Chinese restaurant” or “wine bar” and chances are you’ll find social review sites like UrbanSpoon, Yelp and Chow.com heading the list, along with cookie-cutter directory pages that only list addresses and phone numbers. If somebody is going through the trouble of searching for a restaurant online, you know they’ll want to find menus, daily specials, photos of what to expect, and word of mouth reviews to help convince or discourage them to spend the money. If you have a website for your restaurant, you stand a good chance of visibility in search, and pay-per-click advertising can help boost your brand to encourage click-throughs, and appetites.

Pay Per Click Ads the Price of an Appetizer

Can you entice a hungry person to visit you with just a few words? One might think compared to television ads that showcase a delicious dish in all its glory, a simple text ad along the right side of Google search results won’t attraction much attention. Truth is, PPC advertising, if budgeted correctly, is more affordable than radio or TV, and can be customized to reach specific markets – so you’re not advertising beyond your physical locations. Whether you specialize in steak, seafood, or ethnic cuisine, you can create a list of search keywords on which to bid. Giving Web users the name of an actual restaurant alongside standard directory listings lets people know they can find more information with an actual source.

PPC Cooks Organically

Operate an effective pay per click campaign, whether through Bing, Google Adwords, or Yahoo Search Marketing, and you might find your organic search results improve with the keywords on which you bid. It’s no secret that the cost per click on certain words in Google comes cheaply if you are able to create a high quality score ad (that is, the landing page and ad text are relevant to the keywords), but a bit of PPC help may offer a boost to traditional results, so much that they exceed in click-throughs to your site.

PPC Boosts Social Presence

Restaurants with Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts will see an advantage in specialized pay per click programs with Facebook. Since these ads can be geographically targeted, you can select as specific an audience as you want to advertise your business. Entice visitors to join your fan page to receive discounts or free appetizers and desserts, and build trust among diners who could become regular patrons, and in turn do the advertising for you via word of mouth.

However you choose to advertise your dining establishment, don’t discount the advantages to online paid advertising.

Kathryn Lively is a freelance writer specializing in articles on local pay per click advertising and professional social media services.

Having conquered the Web’s text-based ad market, Google is setting its sights on graphical display ads–a market dominated by rival Yahoo.

The search giant on Thursday took the wraps off a revamped DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a public exchange that allows publishers to offer excess ad inventory they can’t sell to advertisers looking for a bargain. Google said the exchange will meld DoubleClick’s ad exchange with Google’s own technology.

Read the entire article from CNet.