The Art of Online Advertising
Online advertising is all around us. Sometimes it’s discrete, and sometimes it’s in your face. Sometimes it’s helpful, and sometimes it’s annoying. As the web continues to evolve into a completely free service, sponsored only by advertisers, so too does the integrated complexity of online advertising. The purpose of this post is to explore the art of online advertising by looking at human nature with respect to both the general public and advertisers.
How did the internet evolve into a collection of free services?
In the early days of the internet, people had to pay for pretty much everything. Can you imagine having to pay for an online directory? AOL did. And they made a lot of money from it too. Paying for services like online directories was very short-lived, however, due to the human nature of competition. In the mid-’90s, a couple of college students created a free online directory of their favorite websites and later added search capabilities. It was a little project called Yahoo. As other free services began to emerge in order to compete with paid services, the free services began to take over the internet, resulting in the web that we know and love today.
The Nature of Online Advertising
In one of my previous articles, How online advertisers sponsor the internet, I discussed how most of the major websites we use today are free services that earn revenue from online advertisers. That being said, it’s interesting to see how different business models support online advertising. To really understand how online advertising fits into the worldwide web, it’s important to realize what the general public wants and expects out of their internet experience, and what online advertisers want and expect out of ad-driven websites.
The general public, for the most part, uses the internet as a tool to find information, to be entertained, to network, and to get work done. People aren’t usually seeking to find new products and services offered by businesses. Online advertisers, on the other hand, see the internet as a portal of potential new customers. They are generally only concerned with one thing: getting people to find out about their business and getting people to use their services or buy their products. Finally, the free websites that we use every day, like Google, YouTube, and Facebook, must somehow find a happy medium between both of these group’s desires and expectations. How do they do it?
Assault Advertising
Assault Advertising is when a website aggressively forces users to look at advertisements. The most notorious example of Assault Advertising is popup ads. Fewer websites use this technique today because it usually causes new visitors to leave the site and never return. These types of websites are like radio stations that play commercials 90% of the time. Who wants to listen to that?
Assertive Advertising
Assertive Advertising is a technique that websites use to promote advertisers in less aggressive ways than Assault Advertising. For example, when a page or video is loading, sometimes websites will use Assertive Advertising to show an ad while the user waits for content to load. Visitors are usually more accepting of this type of advertising because it’s non-disruptive, unlike Assault Advertising.
Peripheral Advertising
Peripheral Advertising is a type of advertising in which websites display both content and ads simultaneously, with the hope that users might glance at the advertisements while viewing content. This is the most common type of advertising because it’s easy to implement and usually doesn’t annoy visitors. This type of advertising is usually implemented with banners and image ads like the one at the top right of this page.
Inline Advertising
Inline Advertising is the most effective and least invasive form of online advertising. This type of advertising is usually implemented with one or two links integrated within a website’s content. Google for example displays paid advertisements at the top of selected search result pages. As users search for the content they are looking for, they naturally read through the advertisements and have a very high likely hood of clicking on a link.
As another example, Digg uses Inline Advertising by positioning paid Digg articles in the third slot of every Digg category page. WebKrunk also uses Inline Advertising because the end of each article leads directly into two links paid for by online advertisers.
Online Advertising and Its Benefits
Online advertising is a way of advertising an item on the web utilizing numerous web functions. Companies across the globe are becoming digital along with being simpler as well as quicker. Online endorsing or advertising provides a brand new opportunity of conveying your message to a larger number of audiences.
The main advantage of internet advertising over traditional offline advertising is actually the financial benefit, as the expenses involved in internet advertising are much low when compared with the traditional ways of advertising. Online advertising also helps you to easily display the ads to the most targeted and relevant audiences, whereas in the traditional ways it would not be easy to go for targeted advertising.
Advertising on the internet doesn’t have period restrictions and it is seen night and day throughout the world. Online advertising decreases the actual deal price as well as plays a role in the actual revenue from the organization. Most of the online ad platforms enable you to edit your advertisement content and you can modify your advertisement at any point in time. This flexibility is one of the major factors that help internet advertising stand apart from the rest.
Certain online advertising programs also give the flexibility to pay only if anyone clicks on your ads and this is an added advantage as you would not end up with unnecessary spending on your overall budget. ‘Pay-per-click’ advertising is actually one type of ad and it is an extremely economical method of obtaining relevant clicks and traffic to your site.
Smaller businesses claim that internet advertising provides optimum publicity for any minimum price. Online promotion or advertising provides immediate reaction, which makes it lucrative in order to both customer and also the vendor. Banner ads are illustrated with pictorial ads and therefore are generally seen upon as a means of getting higher visitors to the websites as well as provide a website link to the actual marketer’s website. The cost differs based on the number of ads proven.
To conclude, online advertising may be the least expensive as well as an efficient set associated with advertising in whose achievement offers demonstrated it’s possible. It is high time that we make use of the various advantages of online advertising and push up our business by spending less. The benefits of online advertising are a plenty majority of companies and business organizations have shifted to the online mode of advertising.
Search Engine Optimization and Advertising
In today’s net-savvy world it has become common for any business to have a website which they use mostly for advertising their products and services. With the advent of search engines, it has become even easier for customers to search for stuff online. For a website to be successful its link should land in the first three pages which the search engine brings and the rank of the page should be high which means many visitors come to the site.
This can be achieved by applying search engine optimization or popularly known as SEO. This is a marketing strategy that increases the quality and quantity of traffic flow to a particular website via search engines.
SEO not only affects the search engine results but also image search, video search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. It determines how a search algorithm functions and searches what is popular with people. When a website link is submitted to a search engine, a spider crawls through a page to gather links that lead to other pages and stores those pages on the server of the search engine.
The information collected from these pages is sent to the indexer, whose job is to extract information from those pages such as the keywords and their weights, the location of the page, and other links that are stored for the spider to crawl in the future.
In the beginning, the search engine optimizer algorithms were dependant on the keywords, Meta tags, and index files provided by the Webmaster. Meta tags provided information about a particular page, but using them for indexing the pages didn’t prove to be successful as some Webmasters added irrelevant Meta tags to increase the number of hits and earn huge ad revenue. They even changed the HTML of the web pages to achieve a good rank for the page. But this was a case of abuse as it fetched irrelevant pages.
Search engines then began utilizing complex ranking algorithms, which was difficult for the webmasters to manipulate so as to provide web surfers with genuine results. The rank of the web page was calculated mathematically by functions using the strength and quantity of the inbound links.
The higher the rank of the page the more chances it had to be viewed by a person. Later algorithms were developed which considered various other on-page factors such as rank and off-page factors such as hyperlink. Since the webmasters couldn’t manipulate the page rank, they began exchanging, selling, and buying links, which lead to link spamming and even the creation of numerous sites dedicated to this purpose.
Algorithms became more complex with every passing day and top search engines kept their algorithms a secret. As the cost of SEO increased, advertisers were roped in to pay for it, which finally resulted in high-quality web pages. Although investing in SEO is very fruitful, but at the same time is risky because without any prior notice the algorithms being used are bound to change and the search engine will stop directing visitors to the page.
Many consultants are available in the market that provides SEO services. They manipulate the HTML source code of the website like menus, shopping carts, and sometimes even the content of the website to draw more traffic. Search engines like Yahoo have algorithms that extract pages not according to the page rank but according to the cost per click or set fee, that is if an advertiser desires that the page containing his ad be displayed, he is expected to pay money for it.
This is a point of controversy, as only the big businesses will be able to increase the number of hits on their page but not the small business that might be having a better quality page.
Google Ad Words explores ads that have words typed in the search box by the surfer. The Million Dollar Homepage started the concept of Pixel advertising, which is a graphical kind of advertising. Depending on the pixels, space is sold to the advertiser. Keyword advertising involves advertisers who buy URLs of a site and place their ads at that location. Thus SEO is a market on its own that is yielding great results for businesses on the Internet.
The Basics of Facebook Ads
Facebook is now the hottest social networking website today. It has over 62 million active members and is still continuing to grow to this day. With Facebook, people are able to build networks of friends, keep in touch with their old friends as well as build new relationships.
Facebook also provides a lot of fun things for people to do. It has applications that can let members interact with each other and it also provides a great way for people to communicate with each other.
Because Facebook generates a lot of traffic each day with millions of people either logging in or out or subscribing to new accounts, it has now grown to be one of the best places to market products and services.
It’s so popular among internet marketers that Facebook developed an ads system called the Facebook Ads. Basically, Facebook Ads is a pay per click program offered to marketers in Facebook. The great thing about Facebook Ads is that it is very affordable and you will never worry about spending too much money on advertising without getting any return on your investment.
If you have a small budget and you are currently experimenting with your marketing strategy in order to know what is going to work for you and the products or services you are offering, then Facebook Ads is perfect for you.
You need to consider the fact that spending a lot on pay per click ads can have a negative impact on your business. Here are some things that you need to consider in high-cost advertising.
The first thing you need to remember when you are investing in advertising is that you have no idea if the products or services you are offering will convert.
You also have no idea whatsoever if there is even a demand for what you have to offer. All in all, you don’t really have any idea what’s going to happen.
Now, with this kind of risk, why would you set up a 100 dollars a day budget for pay per click advertising when you can get it on Facebook for only 10 dollars a day. When you are just starting and experimenting with your ad campaign, this is a great way to do it. If it works out and you want more targeted traffic, you can increase your budget up to 20 dollars. From there, you can just move your budget up.
If the ad didn’t turn out as expected, you can always improve it without increasing your budget. Always remember that spending more is not really a good thing especially when marketing is concerned.
You have to remember that making huge jumps on the internet is not really how it’s done. Start out small and work your way up. It may take time, but with this method, you will see that you will have little to lose and everything to gain.
When advertising in Facebook Ads, try to test your advertising for your products and services for a week or two with an affordable budget. By doing this, you will be able to find out what works and what doesn’t.
This is how you advertise in Facebook Ads. As you can see, Facebook Ads will provide a way for you to advertise on the internet without spending too much money. Always remember that when internet marketing is concerned, there is nothing wrong with starting out small.