Today Internet is one of the easiest means to advertise which in turn helps marketers to consume. There are certain rules, which have to be followed and applied as similar to other forms of advertising. Those rules will help business and consumers to maintain the internet credibility, which is a highly effective advertising medium.
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers.
Internet Advertising Advantages and Disadvantages
There are more than four billion internet users all over the world. This gives a huge boost to internet advertising. People look for products by using search engines, following their favorite brands in social media, and subscribing to their campaigns via email and push notifications. Advertising opportunities are enormous, but using them correctly is not that easy. So, let’s have a closer look at the advantages and disadvantages of internet advertising.
Advantages of internet advertising
- Easy global coverage. Nowadays, people have a habit of searching for information about products and services via search engines like Google, Bing, and others. Internet advertising is a way to demonstrate your offers in front of over 4.3 billion web users around the globe. You can easily target the entire world via the Internet.
- Affordable for any budget. According to Seriously Simple Marketing, the minimum cost to reach an audience of 2,000 is three times cheaper than traditional advertising methods, so any company from a small family business to a huge enterprise can utilize online ads and get the most out of their financial resources.
- Drives traffic to a website. The more visitors you get to the site, the more potential customers you have, which will result in increased sales. Internet advertising aims to attract users’ attention and send them to your website. The offers displayed in the digital ads should arouse curiosity and give people a good reason for clicking through your site.
- Allows targeting. Unlike traditional marketing media that advertises to everyone without filtering, internet advertising tailors the message to a specifically targeted audience — people who are most likely to convert into customers. For instance, a travel equipment company may use social media ads for advertising to users who are keen on travel, encouraging likes and shares.
- Enables retargeting. Internet advertisements are a way to say, “hey, looks like a couple of days ago you checked out this toaster. I’ve got a marvelous one for you here!” If many prospects visit your household appliances online store without buying anything, remind them about your brand with banner ads displayed on websites they browse.
- It allows you to create various touchpoints with your audience. Internet advertising helps you to appear in the right place at the right time to communicate with your audience. If you own a small bakery, use socials like Instagram and Pinterest to demonstrate the products. To share news, and build long-lasting relationships with your audience, reinforce them with email marketing. By mixing different types of digital advertising wisely, you can show that your company is always present and ready to be of service.
- It is measurable. Unlike offline marketing, where the cost and effectiveness are somewhat approximate, you can precisely track the return on your efforts and internet marketing efficiency with web analytics platforms like Google Analytics.
Disadvantages of internet advertising
The main challenges associated with advertising online include fierce competition, the cost of mistakes, complicated analytics, and ad blindness. Let’s have a closer look.
- High competition. Of course, this depends on your niche, but if you haven’t invented something new, you’ll have to compete for clients’ attention. This market is oversaturated, especially for eCommerce businesses, so you need to put your customers’ needs upfront and regularly improve your product to make it competitive.
- Mistakes are expensive. Targeting wrong people, selecting highly competitive keywords, and leaving your ad campaign running after turning it off are the most common mistakes that can cost you a fortune. To eliminate these mistakes, you need either a top specialist or a lot of experience. Both variants require investments.
- Complicated analytics. To analyze the performance of your ads, you need a third-party platform like Google Analytics and some experience to interpret the results correctly. Medium-sized enterprises and big brands have analysts to make the ads more targeted and effective.
- Ad blindness. This term is related to banner blindness. Users see advertising almost every time they open a web page. For this reason, they simply ignore banners without even noticing them. To fight this, make sure that your banners target the right people who need your offer.
Advertising is part of marketing. To make it clear, let’s define both terms.
Marketing — a process of promoting your products to the target audience. It includes market research, identifying your buyer persona, and analysis. It involves activities that bring your offer to clients.
Advertising — one of those activities that helps spread the word about your brand. Advertising is one marketing element. Others include public relations, sales promotion, direct selling, personal selling.
So, advertising is part of marketing, while marketing is not exclusively advertising
The Internet offers vast opportunities to connect with potential customers, so let’s review some of the most influential types of internet advertising on the market.
Search Engine Marketing
A search bar is the starting point of the users’ buyer journey. Entering a keyword, people focus mainly on the first page results. Search engine marketing is all about getting your webpages to the top of the SERP (search engine results page), whether in an organic or paid way.
Google Ads displays paid results based on the ad rank auction. Companies name their price for a particular keyword, while Google analyzes the quality and relevancy of the content. Here is the formula of the ad rank:
Ad rank = cost-per-click bid × quality score.
Below are the search engine ads for the query “Chelsea fan shop.” For the more popular keywords, there might be up to four ads in the top section. But you already know this if you’ve ever searched on Google.
Email Marketing
This is a marketing approach based on communication via email. This type of internet advertising is one of the oldest players on the field and the most adaptive one since email marketers are always searching for innovations such as recently launched interactive amp emails.
You may personalize, segment, and A/B test your email campaigns to better target your audience.
Social Media Ads
This means advertising on socials like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest for B2C, and LinkedIn for B2B. Companies tailor their news and promotions to the target audience via social media in two ways:
- Organically. If you produce kitchenware, you can post valuable content like hacks, exciting ways of using your products, or some recipes to encourage shares and build an attractive brand image.
- Paid. In this case, you can use social media functionality for business by showing promotional posts targeted to your audience based on age, gender, favorite activities, and other things they have in common.
Display Ads
40% of Americans avoid banner ads, wallpapers, pop-ups, flash, and video ads with ad-blocking software due to the unsolicited nature of display advertising. Furthermore, many non-blockers unconsciously ignore the information in the ads because of a psychological phenomenon called “banner blindness.” Since the mid-1990s, display advertising has gained a negative reputation for being annoying media. Unless ads are highly relevant to the user, they are largely ignored or worse, totally invisible via ad-blockers.
Website owners with massive traffic to their site want to monetize it, so they sell some of their space with Google AdSense, while the advertisers buy it with Google Ads. Google shows relevant ads based on two pricing approaches: CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per thousand views), and allows companies to retarget their promotions.
The ads below are targeted by geographical location and may be interesting for the locals. The website below is from a newspaper based in California.
Native Advertising
In a way, this is a non-irritative alternative to the display ads. Companies pay popular sites like BuzzFeed, Bored Panda, and the New York Times for placing promotion materials in their publications. As long as it happens in an entertaining and casual manner, the readers don’t realize they’ve actually been advertised to — that’s why this phenomenon is called “native.”
It’s like putting a replica of the stone in the Japanese stone garden: no one knows it’s plastic because it looks natural. The example below is nominal, since any of these articles may contain plastic stones.
Video Advertising
As the name suggests, these ads are in a video format and placed on services like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, and Vine. This is an expensive type of advertising but also an effective one, since high-quality videos may go viral. A video advertising campaign called “Save The Ocean” encourages people to join the company that aims to reduce water pollution.
Web Push
This technology allows you to grab users’ attention whenever they are online. These messages appear in the corner of your screen, and a click on it redirects a user to a particular webpage. For example, a coffee shop can send you a morning notification about the 20% discount for making an order before 10 am. Users subscribe to push notifications to stay in touch with the brand and be the first to know the news and updates.
If you own a news resource, you can also take advantage of web push monetization. It means that your subscribers will receive relevant materials from other companies from you in the form of web push notifications together with your promotions.
Mobile Advertising
This type of advertising appears on smartphones and tablets. Companies can advertise with SMS after the user opts-in or with display ads in the browser optimized for mobile devices. If you run a shoe shop, mobile ads are especially good for advertising to the local audiences with the time-sensitive offers. You can create SMS campaigns in no time with SendPulse, and their open rate is extremely high: up to 98%.