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Overview of Online Advertising
Introduction
- the Global market for online advertising now
stands at a staggering $40 billion per year and expected to double to $80
billion dollars per year over the next 10 years. For webmasters, the
various methods of advertising potentially available means instant website visibility and access to thousands of prospects
almost instantly. The key questions a new
webmaster should ask are:-
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How much I spend on advertising?
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How and where
should I best use my budget?
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How do I calculate the return on investment of any
advertising spend?
Unlike hugely expensive TV advertising, online
advertising can provide a lower cost alternative. Webmasters can compete
in niche sectors with large competitors. The following provides an
overview of the main types of online advertising available...
Pay Per Click
- pay per click advertising is the fastest method
of paying to advertise products and services online. It works by
displaying textual adverts next to or normal search engine results. The
user to a search engine is not always aware that a search engine result may be
a pay per click advert (associated with the search term they entered into the
search engine in the first place). Pay Per Click Advertisers can
bid for any 'search term', in a never ending auction system set up by the
worlds leading search engines (like Google's Adwords system) and other pay per
click networks.
Pay Per Click Advertising represents the bulk of Global advertising
spending online as it has been accepted by users who can easily finding
the specific product, service or company based on a simple search engine
query. Pay per click is a form of contextual advertising where the textual
advert is displayed in context with the content it is automatically placed on.
Contextual pay per click adverts are also being inserted as appropriate
keywords and phrases naturally intermingled amongst webmasters content.
Banner Advertising
- less popular than pay per click, the traditional
banner advert consists of a rectangular gif or jpg image, usually placed at
the top of a webpage. Typically, the banner is designed to be eye
catching, with a headline, sometimes using multimedia technology such as Adobe
Flash, to makes the advert appear to move. Users have become annoyed
with 'in your face' banner ads that do not always relate to the content of the
page they are visiting. As a result, the click through rates have
lowered consistently over the last 10 years resulting in very poor return on
investment for advertisers. In the 1990's, banner ad swap networks
sprung up to boost exposure for advertisers. In addition, banner adverts
started charging advertiser on a pay per impression basis. Every time a
webpage is load an 'impression' is counted against that banner being
displayed. Unfortunately, irrelevant search bot 'hits', misleading
statistical feedback and user fraud resulted in artificially inflated
impressions and cost - all helping to give banner ads a bad name. Banner
adverts have more recently evolved into varying sizes and methods.. unwanted
pop-up's adverts and floating banner adverts have also become hated by surfers.
Most of these have resulted from spyware and adware infections from emails or
malicious scripts picked up by unaware users.
Paid Directory Listings
- hundreds of directories of websites have been
established providing every type of vertical industry collection of web sites. A
directory is website constructed around the webmaster submissions categorized
hierarchically and managed by editors.
The largest of directories such as DMOZ or the Yahoo Business Directory
provide a huge variety categories to help users 'drill down' and find what
they want quickly and simply. There are hundreds of
paid online directories available
whereby you can submit your site for a charge. The benefits of advertising in
such a directory (compared to a free directory) is that it is more likely to
have a better qualified prospect who have made click through to your site. There are also many niche directories,
specialising in specific industry sectors, with articles and product reviews
for niche areas. Beware that most smaller directories have only really
been designed to facilitate the purchase of
inbound
links by webmasters, (and not useful in driving real people through the
directory to your website). If you know your average conversion
rate per site visitor, you can then decide whether or not the directory
inclusion charge will create a return on investment. It most cases it does not
or its extremely difficult to quantify. Some of the internets leading
directories are:-
Free Directory Listings
- There are literally
hundreds of directories on the Internet where you can submit your site to.
Most of these directories provided have little qualified traffic back to your
website. If you planned to advertise in such a directory be very careful that
you are not linking back to what Google calls a 'bad neighbourhood'. Most free
directories require a reciprocal link as a condition of the inclusion. Some
simple qualification criteria are as follows:-
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Does the directory have a page rank? (look in your
Google toolbar. If the site does not and it has not even be a cached in a
search engine, do not submit your site to it on the basis of a reciprocal link
from your site.
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Does the site allow automatic inclusion of
submissions or is there a delay following submission so that have a human
editor must approve your submission? Only submit your site to directories
where manual approval takes place. Do not consider first submission to
be a form of inbound of link generation.... only look at the site in terms of
its advertising potential... For instance, is it vertically aligned to the
industry you are in? If so, it is more likely to attract the profile of your
target audience. Conversely, general business directories usually are split
into many 'off topic' categories, (up along the lines of the yahoo business
directory) and will not provide a niche advertising platform to promote your
site.
But it's free so surely I have nothing to lose
by submitting my site to it? Wrong... By innocently submitting your site to a
free directory that has already been banned by search engine (while providing a
reciprocal link back at the same time), you risk being penalised for linking to
a 'bad
neighbourhood'.
Advertising in a Blog or Forum - this
is a great way of to attract your target audience to your site. Do not post
your web address in any
blog or forum related to anything; make sure
the topics discussed match very closely with the key phrases and topics on
your site. When ever you post make sure that your posting a unique and well
thought through article, or responding to somebody's question in an
intelligent and comprehensive fashion. In other words, readers of the forum or
blog will be impressed by your advice and are more likely to click through to
your site.
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