Today, internet plays a pivotal role in both B2B and B2C space. Internet advertising helps the company to reach a large target audience in a small budget and also is easily measurable. It’s highly effective in creating and increasing brand awareness on a whole for any product/service. The following are the various ways to measure the effectiveness of online advertising:
Online
- Downloading of brochures/contact forms
- Completing a transaction on Shopping cart section of the website
- Subscription to newsletter/webinars
- Online enquiry about the product/service through company’s email address
- Google analytics
- Web analytics.
Internet advertising has many advantages in terms of cost-effectiveness. Additionally, Internet advertising is much more targeted; its effectiveness can be tailored through the use of keywords designed to target a specific audience and draw it to your ads.
The three most common forms of online advertising include pop-up ads, pop-under ads and banner ads. According to authors Juan E. Gilbert and Yuehua Lin of Auburn University, these froms are often seen as intrusive to online audiences, which is why advertisers are choosing new models; one of these models is the background sound model.
Pop-Ups and Pop-Unders
These models are currently the most popular form of Internet advertising. Pop-ups involve an advertisement that “pops up,” or opens in a new browser. Pop-unders are not dissimilar to pop-ups; however, pop-unders are hidden behind a Web page that has loaded. There’s no consensus as to how effective these models are. For example, in their article titled “An Effectiveness Study of Online Advertising Models,” Gilbert and Lin state that these models are plagued with disadvantages because they are too intrusive. However, in the article “Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness,” researchers Goldfarb and Tucker explain that these forms are actually effective because they are memorable to the consumer.
Banner Ads
Banner advertising has been called the least effective of the online advertising models, as banner ads are considered easy to ignore. However, according to Scott McDonald of Conde Naste Research, banner ads were effective when located on sites with related content. In 2009, McDonald’s research suggested that related content banner ads were 61 percent more likely to be clicked if the content was related to a website’s content. Additionally, banner ads had a high rate of effectiveness on entertainment and food sites.
Background Sound
One of the newer models of online advertising is the background sound model. This model employs embedded audio ads that appeal to consumers’ auditory sense by streaming audio while the consumer views a Web page. The background sound model is considered cost-effective because it doesn’t require the amount of space that banner or pop-up ads require.