Effective Advertising on the Web

Advertising is a high stakes game with huge price tags for big-time advertising exposure. Internet advertising performance standards are still evolving but the debate over the effectiveness of different web advertising options will only increase as the internet grows. Effective advertising is, in fact, the key to success.

The internet offers a number of ways for businesses to advertise on the web. Because they are free, their effectiveness is relative. Free listings are available on the major search engines like Google or Microsoft’s Bing! or Yahoo! and thousands of other search engines and web directories are an easy way to promote and drive visitor traffic to websites.

Paid Placements Effectiveness

Recent research by the Online Publishers Association indicated that advertising was more effective for branding when on “content sites” as compared with search listings and web portals.   The research revealed that content websites like Martha StewartLiving.com, Oprah.com are better online media outlets relative to purchase intent.

The study was done among the OPA’s 50-member group and thus its findings show some bias.  However, the net takes away from the study that marketers need to assess their own web advertising programs effectiveness.

Millions of webmasters have monetized the space on their special interest website or join with other websites into ad networks such as TargetedMediaOnline.com.  It’s possible to have a display ad on target-specific websites for a relatively small out of pocket costs on content-oriented sites about to reach highly defined target audience even geographically.

Advertising Pricing

The internet offers marketers a very attractive breadth of options for paid advertising online.  It also provides performance metrics that measure the effectiveness of individual campaigns and media properties.   Robust web metrics combined with improved sales data would seem a good indicator of the effectiveness of the advertising program.

Pricing models on the internet include pay per click (PPC),  cost per thousand (CPM), cost per click (CPC) are some of the pricing standards used in internet advertising.    Bid-system pricing by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft provides performance data to aid in a decision about media plan effectiveness.

Data Deluge

One of the beauties of the online space is the abundance of performance data generated.  Cost-effectiveness evaluations are possible but many smaller webmasters don’t use the data available to their advantage.

Professional web marketers are paid to analyze the data and make informed decisions to continue with the existing media plan of websites, ad networks, and portals or make changes in the media mix in a myriad of ways to improve performance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click

Online Publishers and comScore release huge study

http://www.salesandmarketing.com/msg/content_display/marketing/e3i5bc95dcbd3315867a99157b446865738