Advertising on the Web
Most advertising on the Web uses banner ads. A banner ad is a small rectangular object on a Web page that displays a stationary or moving graphic and includes a hyperlink to the advertiser’s Web site. Banner ads are versatile advertising vehicles their graphic images can help increase awareness, and users can click them to open the advertiser’s Web site and learn more about the product. Thus, banner ads can serve both informative and persuasive functions.
Banner ads:
Companies have three different ways to arrange for other Web sites to display their banner ads. The first is to use a banner exchange network. The second way is to find Web sites that appeal to one of the company’s market segments and then pay those sites to carry the ads. A third way is to use a banner-advertising network.
Measuring banner ad cost and effectiveness:
When a company purchases mass media advertising, it pays a dollar amount for every thousand people in the estimated audience. This pricing metric is called cost per thousand and is often abbreviated CPM.
Other Web Ad Formats
The steady decline in the effectiveness of banner ads has prompted advertisers to explore other formats for Web ads. One of these formats is the pop-up ad. A pop-up ad is an ad that appears in its own window when the user opens or closes a Web page. The window in which the ad appears does not include the usual browser controls. The only way to dismiss the ad is to click the small close button in the upper-right corner of the window’s frame.
Ad Formats:
Pop-behind ad:
A pop-up ad that is followed very quickly by a command that returns the focus to the original browser window.
Interstitial ad:
When a user clicks a link to load a page, the interstitial ad opens in its own browser window, instead of the page that the user intended to load.
Rich media ads (active ads):
Generate graphical activity that “floats” over the Web page itself instead of opening in a separate window.
Site Sponsorships
Some Web sites offer advertisers the opportunity to sponsor all or parts of their sites. These site sponsorships give advertisers a chance to promote their products, services, or brands in a more subtle way than by placing banner or pop-up ads on the sites (although some sponsorship packages include a certain number of banner and pop-up ads).
Effectiveness of Online Advertising
After years of experimenting with a variety of online advertising formats, the effectiveness of online advertising remains difficult to measure. A major problem is the lack of a single industry standard measuring service, such as the service that the Nielsen ratings provide for television broadcasting or the Audit Bureau of Circulations procedures provide for the print media. In 2003, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) created a joint task force to review four media measurement systems Nielsen//NetRatings, ComScore, Hitwise, and RedSheriff) and recommend one as the single standard or devise an alternative measurement system. The task force has announced that it is currently considering only ComScore and Nielsen//NetRatings.
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