Internet Advertising Strategies

So you want to do some Internet advertising? Sounds straightforward enough – it’s just like taking out some trade publication ads, only online. Well, not quite. Here’s three strategies you might want to think about.

Banner Ads

In the young and innocent days of the web, big + flashy was thought to = click throughs. So, the best strategy should be: make the biggest, flashiest damn banner ad and wait for the traffic to start flowing your way right? Wrong. Enter “Banner Blindness.” Research has shown that web users tend to filter out banner ads while they’re surfing, automatically classifying them as non-critical information. As Prof. Don Norman writes: “The human attentional system is superb at homing in on areas of importance.”

Search Engine Optimisastion (SEO)

Surfers want relevant information, and they want it now. Which is why people use search engines to locate the information they’re looking for. And I mean lots of people. In 2003, Google alone logged around 250 million searches per day. We know that 2 years is a very long time in the Internet world, so the number of searches being conducted today across all the search engines is, well, a very big number.

So, where your company ranks on the major search engines is critical. And how do increase your rank? With search engine opimisation.

Pay per click Advertising (PPC)

What would you think if a TV advertising exec came up to you and said, “we want you to advertise with us, but we’ll only charge you for the ads that actually get results?” I know I’d think something along the lines of, “awesome, this guy is clearly insane, let’s take full advantage of the mad bastard.” But this is essentially what PPC advertising is all about – if people click through to your site you pay a small fee for the privilege, if not then you’re no worse off.

SEO and PPC combined

But the best strategy seems to be combining SEO and PPC. As Fredrick Marckini argues, “data must flow between search advertising and natural search engine marketing for maximum return on investment (ROI).” This makes a lot of sense - the two strategies complement each other, and the data gained from one can be extremely useful for the other.