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A Quick Guide to Online Advertising
Online advertising is the process of delivering marketing messages via the Internet and World Wide Web used to attract customers, promote sales, encourage clients' loyalty and for other business purposes. Advertising via the Internet involves a number of techniques that depend on the area of interest of a particular business. Here are some of the most popular online advertising strategies:
•· Search advertising is primarily related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. The major sources of this type of online advertising are the biggest search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo. There are also numerous smaller providers of advertising services, but the big three players account for more than 95% of the market. Search engines are the major generators of targeted website traffic which makes them a very appealing advertising option. With Pay-Per-Click advertising you bid on keywords and search terms that you think will be used by your potential customers. Your site appears in the sponsored search results for your targeted keywords and you pay your bid for every click through to your site from those paid-for links. The cost of PPC campaign depends on the popularity of your keywords and the advertising source you choose. Since you only pay for the traffic you get, PPC is considered to be a performance-based advertising method.
•· Cost Per Impression (CPM) advertising - is represented by contextual and banner ads and remains a very popular online advertising technique. Unlike a PPC campaign, here you pay not for the visitors but for a space on a particular website where you place your ads. There are plenty of resources providing such kind of advertising services.
•· Email advertising or email marketing - is a direct advertising technique used to deliver business messages via electronic mail for a number of purposes. Most often email advertising is used to win new customers or encourage new purchases on the part of the existing clients; encourage long-terms customers' loyalty; improve relationship with the customers and for other commercial purposes.
The Online advertising industry is rapidly growing generating billion dollar investments. As more and more people get high-speed Internet access, new advertising techniques evolve such as video and audio advertising. When the cost of online video broadcasts decrease due to the affordable broad-band Internet connections, recorder and even live video messages will become a commonly used advertising method. Since new Internet technologies evolve, the future prospects of online advertising look very promising.
As of today search engine advertising is superior to all other advertising sources on the web in terms of prequalified traffic and ROI. Customers have much more trust in search engines results than in banner ads and other advertising techniques, and therefore search engine traffic boasts higher conversion. Thus it looks like search engines are here to stay the major resource of online advertising.
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