Today, Internet advertising is being recognized in the advertising budgets of businesses around the globe. Advertising is a way to create awareness of your Web site and increase the traffic to it. Ads are placed on the sites that your target market is likely to frequent, thus encouraging this market to click through and visit you.
The Internet offers many different advertising spaces. Ads can be placed on search engines, content sites, advertising sites, portals, and online magazines. The choice of where your ad is displayed is based on the objectives you wish to achieve with your online advertising strategy.
There are a number of advantages to online advertising:
- The response from these ads can easily be measured within one day through Web traffic analysis.
- The amount of information that can be delivered, if your Web site is visited, far surpasses that of a traditional advertising campaign.
- The cost of developing and running an online advertising campaign is much less than using traditional media.
Let’s compare online advertising to traditional advertising. In traditional offline advertising, you generally work with a public relations (PR) firm or advertising company to come up with your marketing concept. As a client, you would review and approve the concepts (usually after several attempts) before they are ever released to the public. The PR firm or advertising company is responsible for developing TV, radio, and print ads for your business. They come up with the media-buy strategy after reviewing appropriate publications, editorial calendars, pricing, and the discounts that they receive for multiple placements. The ads are then gradually released over the period of the campaign and finally are viewed by the public. At the end of the campaign, the PR firm or advertising company evaluates the success of the marketing campaign. This is very easy if the objective of the campaign is to achieve X number of sales, but it is much more difficult if the goal of your campaign is to generate company awareness.
Today, online ads are developed in much less time and are placed on Web sites quickly. Web traffic analysis software can tell you the next day if the ad is working or not by tracking the number of visitors who clicked through and visited your site through the ad. This provides you with the opportunity to change the site on which you are advertising or to change the ad to see if it attracts a larger audience.