Introduction to Online Advertising
Online Advertising encompasses a vast array of online marketing tools and mechanisms such as, pay-per-click ads on search engines, cost per impression ads on third party websites, banner ads, embedded video ads, ads on social media sites, etc. These paid advertising models were the first types of marketing activities to take hold in the online world, and they are evolving and growing in reach every day. They are used by every type of company from Fortune 500 corporations to your local plumber.
Advantages of Online Advertising
- Just like any other type of online marketing activity, online advertising enables marketers to track the effectiveness of ads and to maintain accurate ROI figures for each ad campaign.
- Unlike SEO campaigns that take time to see substantial results, pay-per-click ad campaigns gain companies instant visibility on the front pages of search engines for competitive keyword phrases.
- Pay-per-click ad campaigns are a great tool to supplement your organic search engine traffic and thereby supplement online demand for your product or service
Disadvantages of Online Advertising
- Just like advertising in the real world, online advertising is seen by a nuisance by many users and therefore ads are ignored and not clicked on by this segment of users.
- Unlike SEO campaigns, online ad campaigns are generally more costly, requiring advertisers to pay for each click through to their site, regardless if the visitor was converted into a sale. As competition increases online, cost-per-click bids will increase for the most valuable keywords. SEO campaigns have a more fixed cost structure. After making the initial expenditure and making the changes all traffic that comes in via the organic search results cost nothing per click. The initial expenditure can then be spread over the total number of visits from the organic results of search engines.
Nielsen Online, AdRelevance Top 10 Advertisers, December 2007
