Introduction To Online Advertising

Online advertising is a term often used to describe almost everything covered

in this textbook. Simply put, online advertising is advertising on the Internet.

Online advertising encompasses adverts on search engine results pages

(covered in the chapter Pay Per Click Advertising), adverts placed in emails

and on social networks, and other ways in which advertisers use the Internet.

However, this chapter focuses on display advertising: graphical and interactive

online adverts that are displayed on web pages.

Whether online or not, the main objective of advertising is usually to increase

sales. As well as this, advertising aims to increase brand awareness and share

of voice in the marketplace. Advertising is based on the simple economics of

demand and supply. Advertisers aim to stimulate a consumer need (demand)

and then satisfy that need (supply).

Online display advertising began as simple hyperlinked images shown on

websites and has since progressed to include video, sound and many other

modern technologies. Images or video carry the message and a hyperlink

takes the visitor to the advertiser’s desired landing page. Today, messages

and interactions can be contained within the advertising display, without ever

taking consumers to a landing page. Advertising, naturally, follows web-user

behaviour. Advertisers want to place their adverts where potential customers

will see them. This trend is resulting in the growth of advertising options using

rich, interactive technology, such as games and video and social networking.

Although the Internet provides new scope for creative approaches to advertising,

we see its true advantages when we realise how trackable (and therefore

measurable) Internet advertising is. It is possible to track all interactions with

the advert itself: how many impressions and clicks it received, post click and

view data, and how many unique users were reached.

According to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google “The Internet will transform

advertising because of its trackability, not its beauty” (Lieb 2002).