Effectiveness of Online Advertising

The term online advertisement refers to ads served via the Internet coming in front of web surfers in form of banner ads or graphics embedded with websites. Online advertisements have seen drastic change since last few years in terms of number of advertisements, popularity, availability and importance for any business or entity interested in putting their ads online.

The share of online advertising is increasing if compared with other modes of advertising like Television advertisements, print advertisements or other outdoor advertisement options. But there is always a question, how much change online advertisement options are bringing into your business. Website banners, advertisement in left right or other portions of a webpage, as well as pop-ups are the most popular conventional methods of online advertising. Usually there is no way of tracking number of people who visited a particular advertisement or pop ups available on websites. So, tracking these numbers or getting actual data for visitors is always a question.

The number of visitors for a particular ad or banner was tracked on the basis of clicks by users. Along with time, they became less useful due to popularity of different software specially designed to block unwanted banners or ads. That leaded eruption of more powerful and suitable mode of online advertising like Pay-per-Click modes. The idea was initially introduced by GoTo.com and a refined mode of the same advertising option was adopted by Google in form of Google Ad Words Service. Ad Words service was launched by Google in 2000, listing "sponsored links", consisting of a text headline, a couple short lines and a link next to their search results.


These ads became successful due to three sound reasons:

1. The ads were tied to keywords based on search keys or phrases by internet searchers, which meant that searchers were getting ads highly relevant to what they were searching for,
2. Advertisers only paid for the times people clicked on the ads, and
3. The popular Google search engine drove huge amounts of traffic to these ads.

In this mode of advertising it was easy to track the number of clicks. But in case of banners and floating website ads, tracking is still a problem. They have to rely over a surfer's submission form to get the number of visiting users. An alternative was to do a survey regarding how people reached you? Through your website, or website links present on other websites or referred by search engines. Conventionally people just assume that if after posting ad advertisement, their sales or services queries increased, means they are getting their desired exposure.

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