What Is Online Advertising?

If you’ve never stopped to think about it, you may not realize the sheer variety of types of online ads you see in a day. In fact, the question may not be ‘what is online advertising?’ but ‘what isn’t online advertising?”

Online advertising is a broad field, encompassing contextual ads on search engine results pages, email marketing, social network advertising, and a variety of more specialized techniques, like blog posts and pop-ups.

Although web advertising only accounted for 16% of all advertising spending in 2010, that number can only be expected to rise, not only due to the increased online traffic but because online ads can be more targeted and more cost-effective than almost any other advertising medium.

Online Advertising is Vast…Where do you Start?

As a business who wants to begin advertising online, here’s what you should know: For all intents and purposes, Google is the only game in town. A recent ZenithOptimedia survey found that Google received 44% of all online advertising revenue. For many years Yahoo trailed behind at around 8% market share, but with the advent of social media advertising, that may be changing.

Recently, Facebook, Twitter, and now Amazon are jockeying for market share in the lucrative ‘display ads’ sector. However, early adopters ofFacebook ads are finding they’re not as effective as they’d hoped and experts say it may simply be that people are on social media to interact, and not to shop.

That’s why no online advertising strategy would be complete without Google Adwords. Getting impressions when a user is searching and is already primed is a powerful use of advertising dollars — not to mention Adwords’ powerful remarketing feature, where, if a user clicks on your site, they’ll go on to see more of your ads in the course of surfing, to cement your company in their mind.

Once you’ve started with Google Adwords, of course, there are many ways to spend your advertising dollars — text ads, display ads, contextual ads — decisions that are so specific to your company, budget, and strategy that they can’t be covered in a blog post.

But you can, however, call us for a free consultation to see how to make online advertising work for you. Call us at 877-877-0542 or write to [email protected].