Internet advertising and Web advertising are different names for online advertising.
Online advertising key players
Online advertising is the digital form of advertising that is a medium of communicating a message from one party to another by digitally “pulling” a target audience from the user to the provider of a product or service.
The a-to-z of value creation within the online advertising ecosystem has a number of strategic key players who perform critical functions from ad copywriting all the way to viewable impressions and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) revenue generation. Some of these strategic key players, their tools, and functions include:
- The media owner or publisher: who is the website owner and who displays the ad copy in whatever format it is provided.
- The advertiser: who provides the contents in different formats.
- The advertising agency: who facilitates the relationship between the media owner and the advertiser.
- Advertising affiliate: who provides independent promotional services for the advertiser.
- The ad server: used for digital ad delivery, campaign traffic tracking and management, campaign optimization, tracking and reporting, and post-campaign analysis.
The forms and methods of online advertising service delivery continue to evolve, and like brands, each has its own peculiarity of methods and terminologies. Let us examine five (5) of the most effective online advertising delivery systems.
1.Email marketing:
This is a form of online advertising where an ad copy of a product or service is delivered to the target audience through websites, social media, blogs, and other electronic platforms. The message may be unsolicited, for instance, spam emails or purposefully opted-in by the recipient (permission marketing), with subscription-based opt-ins being a good example. An email advertising ad copy should address the pain points of the intended target audience, with a clear call-to-action (CTA) button strategically embedded in the content. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Unscrupulous advertisers may purchase a mailing list from vendors and proceed to blast out marketing emails to everyone on the list, irrespective of their demographics and psychographics, needs, and interest, with the hope that some may stick. Such unsolicited email blasts are termed spam-mails. However, savvy marketers use email marketing to build relationships with their customers and potential buyers. They make offers that are relevant to prospects such as providing information about upcoming promotional events, special offers and discounts, new product launch, and educational materials. They personalize messages to individuals on their mailing list. For instance, by sending tailored birthday and wedding anniversaries emails with special discounts or even gifts to these individuals. For best practices, email marketing opt-in should be solicited. Customers on your mailing list should be able to unsubscribe if and when they so desire.
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
This is also an inorganic or paid online advertising tool. Advertisers use SEM to improve the ranking of their advertising messages on the search engine result page (SERP), especially on Google and Bing browsers. SEM is an auction-based bid process where the higher your ad ranking, the higher the placement of your ad in SERP. It is also a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising model, which is based on the following four factors:
a. Your search queries:
Search queries consist of keywords, keyword phrases, and keyword groups you have determined are closely relevant words and descriptive phrases your prospective customers may construct to define or to depict as closely as possible your product or service. These constructs, when typed in a search browser during a search for particular products or services closely related to the products or services you sell. For instance, suppose you are a major TV vendor, “television” is too broad as a keyword. When we typed “television” in our safari browser, the SERP produced 5.1 billion matching keywords and keyword phrases. However, by typing “50-inch Samsung smart tv” the SERP was 83.1 million matching keyword phrases.
b. Your maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bid:
The second parameter for PPC bid is your maximum cost-per-click (PPC) bid. As a website owner or online publisher, your website is a platform for advertisers to connect with their audience or customers. Each time a visitor clicks on an ad placed on your website the advertiser pays a pre-determined keyword auction bid price based on the advertiser’s cost-per-click (CPC) theoretically “maximum” bid price. With PPC, the advertiser pays, irrespective of whether or not the ad translates to the desired action or call-to-action (CTA) as pre-determined by the advertiser.
c. Your quality score:
Suppose you desire a loan facility from your bank. Your bank will want to know what your credit score is. If your credit score is bad, your loan application will be declined. If your credit score is below average, you might qualify for a loan but your interest rate will be high. However, if your credit score is high, you will not only qualify for the loan facility you seek, but your interest rate will be low. This analogy can be applied to the explanation of what Google Ad Quality Score means. Four factors determine your ad quality score and rank position in SERP and the bid price you pay.
The factors are namely:
1. the quality and relevance of your keywords.
2. The quality and relevance of your ads, and
4. The quality and relevance of your landing pages.
5. The quality of your user experience
The aggregation of these 4 factors determines your quality score. Quality scores are usually ranked on a scale from 1 to 10. The higher the rank, the low your bid price and the higher your ad appears in SERP, and the lower your cost-per-click (CPC).
3. Your Ad Rank:
Your ad rank is the position on Google's search engine result page (SERP) that your ad is placed. For instance, if your ad is at position 4 on the Google search engine result page (SERP), then your ad rank is 4. Google is constantly updating its algorithm for ranking ad positions. No one is exactly certain they fully understand how the algorithm works, except that higher bids enhance your ad rank, but not as a stand-alone factor. According to Google, the following factors prominently carry more weight in ranking an ad in SERP:
- Ad relevance
- Clickthrough rates
- The prominence of your keywords extension formats.
- bid amount, and
- ad quality
Though your maximum bid amount is a key factor in ad rank as the process is based on an auction type bid process, however, there is more to the story. For instance, your ad must be relevant within the context of what web visitors are searching for. And this is where ad quality, keyword bid and clickthrough rates factor into the equation. For instance, using “High Definition” keyword phrase in your bid, wouldn’t get you very far because it is too broad and its relevance too wide. But “30-inch High Definition Flat Screen television” has a much narrow audience and relevance and will rank your ad higher on SERP.
4. Social Media Advertising.
Social media advertising is a prominent form of online advertising where the focus is the placement of paid ads on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. Social media advertising has a number of vital advantages, least of which include but are not limited to the following:
- Lead generation: inorganic or paid leads can be rapidly generated using social media ads. For lead generation, your social media ads must be relevant, within context and should seamlessly lead to your landing page and your call-to-action (CTA) should be uncluttered, and limited request for customer data is advised; perhaps the name and email address for an initial lead.
- Amplification of your brand visibility: because paid social media ads are inorganic and designed to drive more traffic to your site, you can achieve a higher ranking on business social media pages, which is an effective tactic for enhancing your brand awareness, if you are able to accumulate more social media “likes”.
- Refined audience targeting: on social media sites subscribers usually give away lots of personal information like names, dates of birth, gender, education level, employment status, subjects of interest to them. Social media users also tend to use specific keywords, which you can leverage for targeted online ads, and for the personalization of your ad copy.
5. Mobile advertising
Mobile advertising, which is a subset of mobile marketing, are online ads that are wirelessly connected and displayed on mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers. The main types of mobile advertisements found on smartphones and tablet computers are text-rich media, SMS, banner ads, downloadable apps, and games. Mobile advertising is the fastest-growing segment of the online advertisement. This can be attributed to the fact that almost everyone now owns either a smartphone or a tablet computer or both. Also, mobile devices now outnumber television sets by as much as 3 to 1. TV sets are stationary at locations like the home, workplaces, restaurants, other public and private places, but mobile devices are carry-on devices owned by individuals personally, who may also have television sets at home and at their workplace. Advertisers are increasingly focusing their ad spend on mobile advertisement platforms with an emphasis on personalized one-on-one mobile ads that are much more engaging with mobile device owners.
Mobile ad KPI: Advertisers use three types of key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring the effectiveness of their ad placement on mobile devices. Cost-Per-Install (CPI) measures the cost per installed mobile downloadable app. Effective Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) measures the cost to the advertiser of clicks on mobile ads. And effective Cost-Per-Action (eCPA) is a metric for calculating the cost that an advertiser pays for actions and acquisition instead of buying or paying for impressions or clicks. In terms of terminology, Cost-Per-Action (CPA) is usually used in place of eCPA.
Mobile app promotion: mobile app developers can promote their downloadable apps either organically or inorganically. Mobile apps’ traffic may be incent or non-incent driven. Organically driven mobile app traffic is known as incent campaigns, while the same mobile traffic acquired by paid ad campaigns is known as non-incent.
When incent ad campaigns are used to drive the ranking of a mobile app in app stores, users are provided with incentives to encourage higher and rapid traffic, and this is the upside of incent ad campaigns. On the downside, such tactics may not result in sustainable higher app usage once the incentive campaign ends. Organically, non-incent ad campaigns have a lower rate of downloads and a much more frequent usage as users who opt-in organically are almost always self-driven or motivated by their needs and not by incentives on offer. Therefore, the usability of non-incent apps has higher Customer Lifetime Value as downloads are not incentivized by rewards.
6. Display or Banner Ads
Display ads or banner ads are other forms of paid ad. They are inorganic (paid for) ad formats that are designed with visuals like photos, images, logos, GIFs, videos and other forms of graphics with ad copies or texts explaining what is on offer. The offer could be promotional items intended to induce the site visitors to click and view an ad image. The image could be static or animated. Once clicked, site visitors are taken to the landing page of the display ad. Display ads are not typically found in search result pages (SERPs), but are prominently displayed on websites for ease of notice.
Display or banner ads are excellent for ad retargeting as they are powered by cookies. A cookie is a generic name for HTTP cookie, or web cookie, internet cookie, or browser cookie. A cookie is a small piece of text file stored in a user’s computer web server. Cookies make it possible for a user’s website to monitor and remember activities carried out online by a user on his or her website. These activities include the browser’s online activities like when a user logs in, sites clicked, pages visited, items in the shopping cart, websites clicked.
On a shopping or e-commerce site, for instance, a shopper may abandon his or her shopping cart. To encourage the shopper or to nudge the shopper towards completing the shopping on the e-commerce site, a display banner may be prominently displayed on another site being browsed by the shopper. As the shopper clicks and browses other sites, the prominently displayed ad banner draws the attention of the shopper to click the display ad, which will then take him or her straight to the landing page to complete the shopping by purchasing the items in his or her abandoned cart. Display banner ads are also used to enhance brand awareness and to re-engage a shopper.
Typically, advertisers use cookies to collect data about a user’s online activities like sites visited, dwell time, and purchases made. With this data, a behavioral profile of the online shopper can be constructed. This process known as behavioral targeting can then be used to determine when to target or retarget a shopper using display banner ads. Contextual advertising can also be used by advertisers to retarget a visitor of related product or service website by displaying banner ads in the content of another webpage. Geotargeting, using the IP address of a user’s website can determine the location of a customer, especially if the customer is close to your store and a personalized banner ad delivered to the shopper’s mobile device.
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