Internet Advertising
What is it?
Online advertising is essentially the practice of promoting a product or service on the internet.
Although beginning from similar business principles to traditional advertising, where the audience's attention to a medium is intermittently diverted to commercial promotions, there are some significant differences when ads go online.
Most significantly, online advertising provides extensive information about consumer preferences (through their browsing patterns), such that ads can be very directly targeted to relevant markets. In particular, conversion data can be used to monitor return on investment (ROI), and the success of particular ads and landing pages.
This is a dream set up for advertisers, who have constantly been striving to understand more about what potential customers want, and why.
How does it work?
When we talk about internet advertising, many people immediately assume that the only vehicles for achieving this are those annoying pop-up ads, or marginally more functional banner ads inserted in website content.
With many search engines now incorporating pop-up blockers, and even some tools to block banner advertising, internet marketers are fast realising that for their ads to reach an audience, they must be unobtrusive and relevant.
Problems with Online Advertising
As with any form of advertising, internet advertising can be annoying for a user. Intrusive or obnoxious ads often come in the form of pop-ups and interstitials. Interstitials are ads displayed while a user is downloading content from a site. Other ads can move across a user's screen, or alter the contents of a page. Other more subtle methods involve spreading out content across several pages, or loading new ads while a user is viewing a page.
Worse than this are applications called spyware, or adware, which might alter system settings (like the homepage setting on a browser), launch more pop-ups, or even insert advertisements into non-affiliated websites. These applications often disguise their real intent, by performing useful services, such as providing a search bar. This kind of practice is clearly unethical, and plays on inexperienced web-users.
However, as web-users have become more savvy, and advertisers realise the ineffectiveness of simply annoying potential customers, pay-per-click advertising has grown in popularity.
Pay-Per-Click
Advertisers are generally interested in targeting a specific market or user group. With pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engines, the market essentially targets itself: the ads are only displayed to the people who have entered keywords that the advertiser has bid for.
PPC text-only ads, in particular, move a long way from pop-ups and other annoying practices. They are low profile, and tend to share a familiar context with the natural search results, so users are more likely to click on them.
The Market
The market for internet advertising continues to grow as more and more people go online, and the download time for data becomes shorter.
Search engine marketing involves learning traditional methods and theories of advertising, and re-interpreting them in a new and innovative environment.
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