Advertising on the Web: Options and Trends - Literature review Example

Advertising on the Web: Options and Trends Advertising on the Web: Options and Trends Advertising is the marketing communication by companies to persuade targeted audiences to buy their products, services and brands or pick up or continue certain actions. Advertisements are usually placed where the advertising party believes they will be accessed by the highest number of the most relevant audience. While for profit organizations advertise so as to persuade and convince the audience to use their services and products, not for profit organizations use it to encourage behavior or perception change as well as raising awareness. This communication, generally with respect to commercial offerings, ideological or political support, is commonly via a range of forms of paid media that include the Internet, billboards, print media, and radio and television commercials. Out of these advertising forms, the Internet can be described as a globally interconnected system of computer networks that links billions of devices. It is through the Internet that websites are accessed, in this context a website being a set of related pages that are served by a common web domain. This paper will research and discuss the concept of Internet advertising, also known as web or online advertising, with particular focus on the options and trends with reference to some companies that use this form of advertising. As a branch of marketing, advertising is concerned with the communication of companies, services, brands and products to consumers (Eskilson, 2007). Therefore, the key purpose of advertising is to create awareness about a certain service or product and encourage the targeted audience to start or continue using the said service or product. However, advertisers usually face the challenge of choosing the most appropriate form of advertising that will reach not only the largest number but also appropriate audience and hence, generate maximum business or create the intended awareness. As one of the most common and widely used means of modern day communication, the Internet is not only connecting individuals on personal basis but also connecting businesses to other business and consumers and vice versa. Through the Internet, businesses are able to deliver to their market promotional marketing information. Being a global medium of communication, the Internet provides businesses with unique and cost-effective means of reaching their audiences (Jansen & Mullen, 2008). Further, the Internet platform also offers a range of options that are accessed by different categories of markets and have diverse impacts. Examples include social media (such as Facebook and twitter), email marketing, mobile marketing, display advertising (such as web banners) and search engine marketing. Further, businesses can develop and host their own websites or have it done on their behalf remotely by online advertising companies. For businesses that operate outside their local communities and in geographically diverse and wide areas, the Internet has become a necessity. It is most beneficial for businesses that target national and international audiences and have extensive distribution capacities. With the knowledge that the Internet is not only used for information and entertainment, businesses rapidly took advantage of the opportunities consumers created and started placing targeted and relevant advertising messages on websites. Advertisements by businesses have enabled Web applications to sustain themselves instead of relying on subscriptions. With its vast reach, the Internet enables businesses to access larger parts of the market than they do with traditional means of advertising. Further, it is also much cheaper to advertise via the Internet. As the Web increasingly grew commercialized, they were broadly categorized into e-commerce sites and content sites. E-commerce sites advertise and sell products and services and make money from the sales. On the other hand, content sites collect and create content such as videos, pictures and words for Internet users to go through and their money is primarily made through advertising. Essentially, Web advertising is accessing and staying with consumers. The common forms of Web advertising include pop-ups, sidebar advertisements and banner advertisements. Pop-ups are advertisements that pop up in their own windows when a Web page is accessed. Typically, they obstruct the Web page one intends to read, which means it must be closed or moved away. Although closely related to pop-up advertisements, pop-under advertisements are less obstructive and intrusive because they position themselves beneath the current page and content one is reading. However, these two are often annoying by characteristically cluttering the device being used and often take long to close, which contributes to the disadvantages of Web advertising. Banner advertisements are the 728 by 90 pixel advertisements that appear at top of Web pages (Lee & Ahn, 2012). Popular Web sites charge a fee to place banner advertisements on their Web pages. To incorporate interactive elements such as animations, audio and video, banner advertisements use rich media and usually delivered via central advertisement servers. Sidebar advertisements are similar to banner advertisements but rather than appearing horizontally at the top of the page, they appear vertically on the page. Because of the vertical orientation, sidebar advertisements are generally 600 pixels high with widths of 120 pixels. Sidebar advertisements are more effective than banner advertisements because they are almost twice or thrice as large as banner advertisements (Lee & Ahn, 2012). Further, they cannot be scrolled away from the screen like banner advertisements. This is because scrolling down just 60 pixels will remove the banner advertisement from the screen but a sidebar advertisement will linger on much longer. That aspect of increased impact gives sidebar advertisements the characteristic of generating greater branding power (Benjamin & Baker, 2008). Floating advertisements are a variety of rich media advertisement that superimposes advertisements over the content of the website that has been requested. Just at the start of the 21st century, Overture, a company that was later acquired by Yahoo!, developed a new concept in searching where advertisers would bid on key words. Essentially, keywords are the words contained in a search query. When that keyword was searched by users, the links each of the advertisers that had bid on that particular keyword were displayed. The links were displayed in the order of the highest bidder first. Then, the advertisers paid the amount they had bid any time there links were clicked on. However, that model of searching was only useful and significant in cases where the searcher was actually looking for advertisements (Benjamin & Baker, 2008). On the other hand, it bore no considerable significance when the searcher was only seeking information. Although there are many other sites, search engine marketing has by far been the most worthwhile site for Web advertising. Most of the impact of search engine advertising has been generated by the AdWords model by Google several years after adapting it from Overture that matches search questions to advertisements. That was at a time when Google was already a reliable search engine and consumers were willing to have confidence in the advertisements shown. Sites such as Craig’s List and eBay allow businesses to advertise directly on their Websites for free, a commission or a fee (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011). Search engine marketing was designed to increase the visibility of a website in the results provided by a search. Basing on the search query, the search engine will provide either sponsored or non-sponsored results. In order to differentiate sponsored and non-sponsored results, the search engines make use of visual cues. Search engine optimization is an attempt to enhance the non-sponsored rankings of a website by increasing the relevance of the contents of the website. Sponsored searches allow the inclusion of advertisers in the results of sponsored searches using certain keywords. Google needed to make the same system useful for both the searcher who was looking for something to by and the one who was simply looking for information. To achieve this, objective criteria and the list of responses basing on page ranking were kept separately from the list of advertisements. Google developed the AdWords model beyond the one presented by Overture. First, Google only showed a limited number of advertisements with every query. Hence, whereas Overture ordered all the advertisements linked to certain keywords, Google decided which advertisements to show and also the order in which they would be shown. Second, AdWords users specified a budget, which was what they were ready to pay monthly for all the clicks on their advertisements. Such constraints typically compounded the issues with assigning advertisements to search queries. Third, rather than simply ordering advertisements basing on the bid amount, Google also based the ordering on what they expected to earn each time the advertisement was displayed. That means that the rate of click-through for each advertisement was observed, basing on that advertisement’s history of displays. Therefore, an advertisement’s value was considered to be the product of the rate of click-through and the bid. The technological acceleration of online technology and the ways in which businesses and consumers can discover, make use of and engage with information is almost a challenge to keep pace with, but is setting a trend in Web advertising (Goldfarb & Tucker, 2011). Web advertising is much more than simply selling products and services to consumers at the moment, but entails future selling as well. From this point, the concept of discovering, making use of and engaging is significant because it goes beyond the notion of search engine or social network and places more focus on technology and consumers. When businesses and advertisers consider questions such as will Google be in use in the next 10 years; will desktop computers be in use in the next 10 years; or what will be the nature of social networks in 10 years; the answers they come up with will also shape the future of consumer engagement and advertising. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook have been highly innovative in order to capture the attention of consumers. Their approach towards reaching markets is also greatly varied, with the use of devices, infrastructure and content being the most common (Goldfarb & Tucker, 2011). Businesses are also developing models that are adaptive and allow for seamless assimilation of emerging trends and technologies rather than sequentially moving through new developments. For the sake of survival, businesses are being compelled to evolve their adaptability at a faster pace and align themselves more efficiently with trends. They are also developing partnerships and infrastructure that facilitate innovation and faster evolving (Benjamin & Baker, 2008). This is as opposed to waiting to find out that it is painfully costly to avoid changes and being reluctant to keeping up with the trend. Viewed from a practical perspective, it is apparent that the modern Internet does not exist on computers alone as consumers as well as content are shifting to mobile devices such as smartphones and devices. This has made the search experience distinctively different for both businesses and consumers, for example via innovations such as Siri in which search visibility is optimized. Web advertising is typically a low-cost venture. Since electronic communication does not cost much, it generally reduces the cost of placing advertisements on Websites in comparison to offline advertisements. Advertising on the Web an especially through social media provides businesses with affordable venues in which they can engage interactively with the larger portion of the consumer bases. Another key benefit of advertising on the Web is that it allows businesses to gather data on the effectiveness of their advertisements. Such data may include the potential audience’s size or their actual response. It is also possible to trace how visitors accessed the advertisement and whether a buying decision was made (Eskilson, 2007). Since it also possible to know whether or not an advertisement loaded while a visitor was on the Web page, advertisers will know if and how to improve their advertisement. The formatting of Web advertisements provides a unique feature by being interactive. For instance, others allow visitors to input queries or allow them to stay connected to businesses through social media. Advertisers can also be given the ability to access narrow and customized market segments by publishers in cases of targeted advertising. However, some disadvantages are also associated with Web advertising. For instance, the advertisers materials will automatically be available for ill-intending users to copy from anywhere around the globe, the legal consequences notwithstanding. Trademarks, images and official logos can be copied by anyone and used commercially. Some may even be used to mock or slander the legitimate owners of the content. In conclusion, advertising is known to be the branch of marketing concerned with the communication of companies, services, brands and products to consumers. The Internet has been seen to be one of the most common and widely used means of modern day communication, connecting businesses to other business and consumers. Advertising on the Web is an innovation that is developing rapidly aided by technological advancements and the manner in which the Internet is used. Unlike traditional advertising such as television, radio and newspapers, Web advertising promises and achieves a wider reach with the additional advantage of providing interactive platforms through which consumers can give their ideas. Further, advertising on the Web can also be selected as per the interests of individual users, enhancing the aspect of targeted advertising. References Benjamin, L., & Baker, D. (2008). Industrial-organizational psychology: The new psychology and the business of advertising. California: Wadsworth. Eskilson, S. (2007). Graphic design: A new history. Connecticut: Yale University Press. Goldfarb, A., & Tucker, C. (2011). Privacy regulation and online advertising. Management Science, 57(1), 57-71. Hilbert, M., & Lopez, P. (2011). The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate and compute information. 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