With many forms of online advertising such as Google AdWords, you only have to pay when someone actually clicks on your ad.

Similarly, with social media advertising, you will only pay when an interested user interacts with your ad e.g. by clicking on your link or liking/sharing your post.

This is fantastic for advertisers as the people that interact with your ad are the ones who are most interested in your products and services, they are the people you want to pay to get in front of.

With traditional media, this just isn’t the case.

Take radio ads for example, you are paying to be put in front of everyone who listens to that particular station.

There’s likely a huge percentage that aren’t interested in your offer for various reasons, but you will still have to pay for those listeners as well.

Due to the nature of online advertising, you can create highly targeted campaigns using a mix of keyword planning and buyer persona’s.

In Google AdWords you can pay to put your ads at the top of Google’s search results for the specific terms you want to show up for, in the geographic area you want to show up for.

For example if you sell antique furniture in Cork and don’t ship it nationwide, you can have your ads only show up when someone in Cork is looking for your specific niche products with search terms like “antique chair dealer Blackpool” etc.

Comparatively, social media advertising allows you build a highly focused targeting method around information that your potential customers have given to the social media sites like their interests, age, where they live and their occupation.

So, for example, if you were selling clothes for toddlers, you could target all of your advertising towards parents with children ages 3 and below.

The huge potential for highly targeted ads in digital marketing is a stark contrast to that of traditional media.

If you take out an ad in a newspaper, there will be a broad spectrum of people from different areas, backgrounds and stages of life.

If you were to take out an ad in a newspaper for either of the businesses in the above example, you have no way of differentiating between who will see it. You have to take a pray and spray approach and just hope that the right people see your ad and take an action, it’s blanket advertising rather than honing in on specific groups.

Through the use of AdWords tracking, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel etc, it has never been easier to track specific results from every digital marketing campaign. You can actually see how much you spent and get an exact figure for how much your advertising spend affected revenue.

You can see exactly how many people have seen your ad, how many people have clicked your ad and even how many people have called you as result of an ad and how long they were on the phone for.

All of that can even be made more specific, so you can see the figures for just one day or the entire campaign.

Getting such precise measurable results is a huge benefit as it allows for constant testing and tweaking of campaigns so that they perform at their very best and make the most possible money for your business.

If you compare all of those measurable results with traditional media advertising like flyer drops, you will see a huge fall off.

For example, if you run a takeaway and you carry out bulk menu drops as a part of your marketing strategy, there’s just no way you can get the same measurable results. For starters, you don’t know if the people dropping off your menus have been completely honest and actually delivered all of the menus that they were supposed to.

You also can’t know how many people hate getting junk mail and threw it straight in the bin, maybe even swearing off ordering from your restaurant again. You can’t even measure the number of people that have made an order as a direct result of getting your flyer without including a unique discount code.