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Advertising
Advertising
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Almost every major website features advertising – banner adverts aim to tempt users to click and be transported to another site. In theory, the Internet advertising model seems near-perfect: since using visitor analysis you can target your ads so that they are displayed to a niche range of viewers, selected by country of origin or subject of interest, the production costs are low, advertising costs are similar to print media, but you can very accurately measure response with visitor analysis on your website. Some of the most sophisticated advertising sites are the large, popular search engines (such as Google, MSN and Yahoo!). These search sites have an added bonus for advertisers – a particular advert can be displayed in response to a visitor’s search keyword. If a visitor searches for plumbing suppliers, they’ll get the results of the search plus banner ads from your plumbing supply company. (Google and now Yahoo! have taken this model and turned it on its head allowing websites such as this one to display adverts placed and paid for by other sites - see the vertical list of ads on the right-hand side; if you click one, the advertiser pays Google who then pays a small percentage to this site.) Online advertising provides an exciting new market and outlet - it complements traditional advertising media and can reach niche targets very effectively. To cover the new technology, there is a new language of describing the medium, a different way of pricing and specialist online ad agencies who can buy or sell advertising space. Advertising on the web has become another way of promoting a product or service, complementing traditional media such as print, TV, radio and direct mail. Most web-based advertising is in the form of display-style ads called banner advertisements; these are wide oblong graphic panels that you'll have seen scattered over almost every commercial website. The banner image is normally hyperlinked to another site – if a viewer clicks on the banner, they’ll jump to the advertiser’s site. Banner ads have settled into two main standard sizes: 468x60 or (sometimes) 120x120 pixels. The image for the advert is normally stored as a plain image file (GIF or JPEG formats) or if it includes simple movement and animation it will be GIF and for more complex animation Flash format is used. |
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