Is
there such a thing as “traditional” online advertising? If there is, it
started with banners, moved to FFAs, took a step backwards with SPAM, a
hard right with classified advertising and then shot forward with pay
per click search engine. So how do you know where to spend your
advertising budget in the current market?
If
you’ve been responsible for your company’s web advertising efforts over
the years you might agree that the traditional means of advertising
worked; as least for a little while. So as new types of advertising
penetrate the market with increasing frequency, what do you do with
those proven stand-by methods of generating links and traffic? Throw
them out? Keep them around for posterity? Maybe give them a facelift?
Let’s review those traditional ad models then look at some experimental
models.
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TRADITIONAL ONLINE ADVERTISING MODELS
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Banners
Banner ads in the form of animated gifs are the most common and
widely used form of online advertising today. Banner ads reach the
widest possible audience because practically 100% of Internet users can
view them without any special plugins. Web marketers, advertisers and
promoters have quickly realized that banners under 12k in file size puts
the ad in front of the visitor as quickly as possible, increasing the
chance of click-through even though surfers are growing increasingly
immune. New styles and shapes of banners (such as skyscraper ads) have
grown in popularity recently, which is addressed in the “Experimental
Advertising” section below.
SPAM
What does SPAM stand for? It’s not “Stupid Pointless Annoying
Message” (which in some cases it could be) but rather “Sending and
Posting Advertising Messages.” It’s hard to believe SPAM is effective,
but unarguably, it is. While click-through rates continue to fall and
legislation begins to rise, it is a savvy advertiser’s best bet to stay
away from it, unless of course you’re selling Pasta Pots or Viagra.
Rich mail – “Fancy SPAM”
Most likely, the e-mail messages you receive on a daily basis are
text only. Rich mail, on the other hand, allows graphics, video and
audio to be included in the e-mail message. When you open up a rich
e-mail your e-mail client automatically calls up your Internet
connection and launches an html page in your browser. E-mail clients
that are offline will invite you to click on the link when you have your
Internet connection open again. If your e-mail client does not support
graphics you will receive the e-mail in text only. While SPAM is still
SPAM, rich mail has proven to be much more effective than standard text
messages.
Pop-Ups/Pop-Unders:
This creative, yet completely obtrusive and annoying means of
advertising was once celebrated in some circles as the most innovative
ad concept since banners. It only took a short time before many users,
sick of being trapped in a never-ending onslaught of such ads, voiced
their rejection. One can only wonder when advertisers will recognize the
public dissatisfaction and move on to another more effective means to
promote their companies.
Institutional Advertising:
While institutional or “in-house” advertising has been available
since the inception of the Internet, few companies have made an effort
to utilize the many different aspects of online advertising in one
format as has 7Search.com with its Direct Pay-Per-Text advertising.
7Search, a leader in the pay per click search engine arena, has recently
introduced this program which enables its advertisers to advertise
outside of its search return lists using the same titles and
descriptions seen on its search engine. The pay-per-click model enables
interested advertisers to leave behind the CPM impression model and
focus on the click conversions. Direct Pay-Per-Text is a patent-pending
concept from 7Search which will be released to the general public in the
coming months.
Pay-Per-Click Search Engines
It’s hard to think of PPC search engines as a “traditional” means to
advertise online, but the ratio of those advertisers who do versus those
who don’t is staggering; in fact the majority have at least tried their
hand at leasing traffic. In a PPC agreement, the advertiser only pays
for qualifying clicks to the destination site based on a prearranged
per-click rate. The response on ads with well-written titles and
descriptions targeted to the users query pull response rates unseen in
the ad industry previously. The greatest advantage arguably is the
ability to measure precisely the rate of return versus your investment.
Some of the most popular PPC search engines are FindWhat.com,
7Search.com, Ah-ha.com and the industry leader Overture.
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EXPERIMENTAL ONLINE ADVERTISING MODELS
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Traffic Exchange Advertising:
Hit exchanges, actually a form of banner exchange, are a recent
phenomenon on the Internet. You will visit the site of a member of an
exchange, and in exchange, another member of the exchange will visit
your site. The recent explosion of hit exchanges on the web has diluted
the effectiveness of such a method of advertising. There have also been
many instances of cheating, in which a script is used to generate visits
to a site. However, if you have a product that is of interest to
webmasters, and is low cost or has a free version, there is no harm in
giving hit exchanges a try.
Shockwave ads
Shockwave is best suited for campaigns
that want to utilize out-of-banner real estate, such as applets, trading
cards, and games. Director and Flash provide the ability to embed
interaction, video, and audio within the file, making Shockwave files
some of the richest ad units on the Web. Viral marketing and strong
brand interaction are two of the key strengths of Shockwave ads. As
these ads are typically “bandwidth monsters” the adoption has been slow
and will most likely remain that way. Other downsides include
development costs and the fact that it just won’t work without the
Shockwave plug-in, which (though downloaded by millions of users) is far
from being a mainstay.
Interstitial ads
Interstitials are ads that play between
pages on a website, much like television ads play between sections of a
program. There are several variations on the interstitial model: some
play in the main browser window, while some play in new, smaller
windows; some are pre-cached, while some stream ad content as it plays;
some provide the ability to create very rich ads, while some focus on
smaller, faster-loading ads. Whatever the format, nearly all
interstitial ads perform very well if measured by both click-through
rates and brand recall.
Floating ads and
DHTML
Types of floating ads include DHTML
sponsorships, in which advertising objects "fly" across the page on a
preset course; cursor sponsorships, in which the cursor turns into an
advertising image; and scrolling ads, in which an advertisement moves up
and down the edge of a page as the user scrolls up and down. Floating
ads give the advertiser and publisher the flexibility to achieve nearly
any effect. However, as this is one of the more daring types of online
advertising, advertising and content must be balanced on any given page.
Floating ads (especially DHTML and cursors) are best run for short
periods to create brand awareness—running them for longer periods can
bring negative user feedback.
It is important to understand that online advertising is only effective
if it generates significant response and this applies to both
traditional and experimental ads. Unfortunately, the only way to
discover the efficiency of your campaign is to test in every format at
least once with as many ads as you are able.
