Myquestions

Online marketing has seen a reasonable boom in South Africa over the years as more and more businesses see it fit to market their products and services online. Our current internet user base is still small, but it is growing with the arrival of the under sea cable in June there will be a gradual increase in internet usage. This boom in the internet has resulted in the need for effective online marketing procedures and we all know that the big plus factor of online advertising is it provides measurable results. Forms of online marketing include:

· S.E.O

· S.E.M

· Social Media Book marking

· Blogging

Currently Google AdWords is the most widely used online marketing tool, because it is contextually based, and the fact that ROI can be tracked via conversion tracking. There is one problem which is unlike in the United States this form of advertising cannot be targeted to a higher level, for example targeting people to serve the ads according to criteria like location, age gender and interests even though it is not much of a problem, but when the internet user base increases, this will be one feature online advertisers would want..

Enter Facebook based advertising

Sometimes I think that the creators of Facebook planned to do this all along, they probably sat down way back in 2003 thinking ok how are we going to create a site that will give us peoples details, likes dislikes, habits locations and all. And some years later we have Facebook… the power of Facebook is evident when you look at the back end of its advertising platform, it is very revolutionary and I was amazed at the way you an  target your ads, though still being perfected, once it is it will be a force to reckon with. A few drawbacks that I can see is that the ad placement is not ideal that a lot of people.