The Growing Importance of Internet Advertising

While your website, with the latest SEO may gradually build its online popularity; if you want to acquire customers quickly you need to put your branding message where your target audience routinely visit.

Internet advertising is therefre important to getting the sales volumes you desire more cost efficiently than offline promotional means. Besides being cheaper; Internet advertising gets you faster results and in many cases far more sales as the web becomes the chosen medium of many people around the world.

Internet advertising also offers unmatched convenience as customers need to just click on a link to your website for additional details (instead of having to jot down details in the case of advertisements through traditional media). Marketers can also get to know the geography of their advertising users/viewers so they can optimise their display contents according to their custom needs: this facility is unique to Internet advertising.

Internet advertisements can also be changed quickly and reach out to users immediately enabling marketers to be adaptive like never before, to fully address the new market/product needs. Internet advertising is thus a smart alternative to both users as well as marketers.

Types of Internet advertising

Internet advertising is available in different technical formats and can be viewed across different media types. As the Internet’s reach is global and content available instantly from centralised (hosted) location marketers can easily manage multiple advertising campaigns across different locations from a single office location – in real time. The popular types of internet advertising are:
Banner advertising-Many websites have paid / non paid internet advertising space available for banner advertisements. These advertising slots are for specific banner sizes on specific locations of a webpage. Pricing for these banner advertisements may be of the following types:

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising- Also called ‘keyword advertising’; these are text based advertisements that appear on search result pages of your chosen search engines. For these advertisements marketers need to bid for keywords (or those words that your target audience would generally use to search for needs related to your product/service). As search engines gain in popularity, PPC advertisements enable marketers to reach more people faster than most of the other forms of Internet advertising. Success of PPC advertising depends on the usage of correct keywords and you can experiment with many combinations till you find that option which gives you maximum clicks (responses). You can also choose your country and or region within the country and the accompanying content language for displaying your PPC advertisements. When your PPC advertisement is displayed and people don't click on it, it is promoting your brand without you having to pay for its impressions.

Pop-up & pop-under advertisements – These advertisements are today considered intrusive and are not recommended as the they pop up/under in front of the web page the moment the desired web page is opened (or after a particular interval). As it is difficult to miss them and have higher click throughs than banner advertisements they are generally priced higher. The latest version is a slide in advertisement that fools any pop-up advertisement blocking software. These advertisements need to be made very creatively otherwise people tend to get irritated by them. They can be an effective way of gaining market research as part of your shopping cart abandonment process.

Newsletter advertisements- There are scores of online newsletters (paid and free) that are routinely subscribed by web surfers. These newsletters have a dedicated readership thanks to their topical content and ease of use. Custom e-newsletters are available on almost all topics imaginable, and many carry paid advertising (text or banner advertisements). They have targeted audiences of people who sign up to receive these newsletters. As readers tend to forward their favourite newsletters to their friends, advertisements on them can benefit from viral marketing too.

Profiling the audience of the newsletter is just as important as placement within the newsletter to maximise response rate.

Choosing the right advertisement/media platform

As the Internet media’s reach is global, understanding media consumption patterns becomes important. Ideally your advertisements should be available in those geographic locations where you have no economic, legal and logistical problems. As there are still chances of advertisements being seen in other areas (as they could be copied and sent by e-mail), it is better to specify the regions applicable to your offerings. In any case, the choice of Internet advertising is so vast that it makes sense to use all different types in a phased manner to make best use of limited resources and also put learnings of one type of promotion in subsequent advertisements.