Online Advertising

online advertising

What is online Advertising?
Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, interstitial ads, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam.
Why Online Advertising?
Your Web site is finally live ? now the real work begins. If you don’t spread the word, your fabulous new site will be like the proverbial tree in the forest, falling with no one to hear. Luckily, Internet advertising can help you reach millions of people at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing techniques.

Benefits:
One major benefit of online advertising is the immediate publishing of information and content that is not limited by geography or time. To that end, the emerging area of interactive advertising presents fresh challenges for advertisers who have hitherto adopted an interruptive strategy.
Another benefit is the efficiency of advertiser’s investment. Online advertising allows for the customization of advertisements, including content and posted websites. For example, AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and AdSense enable ads to be shown on relevant web pages or alongside search results of related keywords.
Providing information about your location and market sphere that search engines understand can help you reach only people in your business area.
Free Advertising
As a cost-saving measure, you may have considered using a free online classified service to advertise your business and get noticed. Free is (usually) great, but you get what you pay for. The problem with free ads and other free online marketing channels is that they might give the wrong impression of your company.
Some free ads come off as cheap and second-rate, words you certainly don’t want attached to your business.
It’s nice to save money with guerrilla marketing tactics, but you don’t want to sacrifice the image and integrity of your business in the process. Good guerrilla marketing — such as a rewards-based customer referral program — helps grow your business organically and project a professional image.
Affiliate programs can be a very inexpensive way to advertise and make some money while doing it. Companies that offer affiliate programs place an ad on the partner’s site. When a visitor clicks on the ad and ends up making a purchase with the ad company, the partner company earns a commission. These types of cost effective Internet advertising methods help both companies. So starting an affiliate program will allow the website owner to place his or her own ads on companies who are participants in that program. Having many partners in this program can give a company a lot of exposure and increased web traffic.
marketing on various web pages or via email are some of the best ways to reach thousands of potential customers for a relatively low amount of money. Consumers have learned to utilize the web when they are in the market for a particular item or service. They know that the Internet can provide a wealth of information on whatever the consumer needs to purchase.

Millions of people use the Internet everyday, so it would seem like the ideal location to simply place ads and generate great results. But that is not necessarily the case. Many novice and veteran online advertisers make the same mistakes, which undercut the effectiveness of their Web ads. Here are 10 of the most

common mistakes with some tips on how to avoid them.
1.   Wasting money. No business owner wants to throw their money away on ineffective ads, but many still do. Business owners routinely spend money to advertise on Web sites that generate lots of unique hits but do not draw paying customers to their businesses. Track the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, and discontinue advertising on any site that does not deliver quality leads that convert into sales.
2.   Paying for pop-ups. Pop-up ads generally are not effective. In fact, they may turn away rather than attract your prospects. The growing popularity and effectiveness of pop-up blocking utilities make buying pop-ups a losing proposition.
3.   Spamming. If you are sending unwanted emails, you may be sending SPAM, which can ultimately hurt your business. Email marketing is possibly the most effective tool in your arsenal, but it must be used properly. You should generally market only to people who have opted in to your mailings.
4.   Overspending on copywriters. Web copywriting is not rocket science. A smart, creative young copywriter with fresh ideas can often do a comparable or better job than a veteran writer. There is no shortage of young writers looking to build a portfolio of their work If you are working with a copywriter and not getting the results you want, try another writer.
5.   Favoring style over substance. Most advertising puts style ahead of substance, but Internet advertising is an extreme case. Flash animation and other high-tech “glitter” is no substitute for saying something significant about your product or service.
6.   No call to action. For an ad to be effective, you must tell people what to do. Putting your name in front of your target audience on a regular basis is half the battle, the next step is letting them know what you want them to do. A call to action can be as simple “Click here to learn more,” but every ad should have one.
7.   Stale advertising. The same boring ad does not enhance your brand, and it may even damage your brand equity. While an established brand, slogan or logo could be your trademark for many years, you still need to remain current and continue to include creative variations on a theme.
8.   Not utilizing all your online (and offline) opportunities. While you never want to “junk up” your site or your newsletter with too many ads, you need to strategically place advertisements and promotion in the right places for the best results. Too often, page headers and footers and other key locations are underutilized. Advertising your own products, both on- and offline, is critical.
9.   Not being viewer-friendly. Just as your Web site should be user friendly, it should also be easy on the eyes. Readers should be able to get the intended message clearly without being distracted by flashing ads, imposing blocks of text, or other design faux-pas. Read Eight Top Web Site Design Mistakes for more information on how to design and build great-looking Web pages.
10.   Poor placement. If you do not know where your ad will be placed, do not spend a dime on it. When you purchase advertising on a Web site or in a newsletter, find out exactly where and when your ads will appear. Make sure your ad appears as it should, appears where you wanted it to, and when you expected it to run. Follow-up and tracking are critical to any advertising campaign.
there isn’t much consensus on which type of ad works best, in part because it depends upon the product, the host site, the user’s preferences and mood, and other variables.

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:
•   Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.
•   Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.
•   And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor