Online Advertising

With the huge growth of the Internet, email, and the World Wide Web, we have seen a huge growth in how businesses advertise themselves.

Online advertising is the use of the Internet to promote a business’s products and services. We will examine several different methods of online advertising in the modern online world.

In this lesson, we’ll learn about:

1. Search engine adverts
2. Banner & popup adverts
3. Email marketing
4. The affiliate model for online advertising

Search engines are a big way of advertising online because a huge quantity of traffic to a website is gained through search engines. In fact, well over 50% of website traffic comes from search engines.

Many companies pay thousands of pounds to perform search engine optimisation to get their websites to the top of the search engine results pages.

If you’re at the top of the search results, you’re more likely to be seen and visited, which can help you sell your products or services.

You can also pay a search engine to have links to your website appear at the top of the results for certain search keywords.

With these search engine adverts, you will normally only pay the search engine when someone clicks on the link. This is known as pay-per-click.

Depending on the popularity of the key terms you choose, this payment can be as little as a few pence per click or as much as a few pounds.

Banner and pop-up advertisements are adverts that usually appear on the top or sides of a webpage and are often animated to grab your attention.

Many services will automatically change the adverts on a website to ones you are particularly interested in based on your browsing history.

This way, users of the site are more likely to see an advert for a product that is relevant to them, increasing the chances of a successful sale.

However, these types of adverts are often unpopular with internet users as they are normally brightly coloured and animated, which can be distracting.

Banner & pop adverts also normally use the pay-per-click model of payment.

Email marketing is where businesses use email to send adverts to potential customers. This is best when sent to customers who have specifically requested these emails.

When you sign up for a website, they often ask if they can send you emails to advertise products that you might be interested in.

However, unsolicited bulk emails are known as spam. Rather than targeting products you might be interested in, spam emails send an advert to a huge number of people in the hope that a few people will buy.

Products sold through spam adverts are normally not legitimate products.

Many businesses that sell products online run affiliate programs to get other websites to advertise their products.

A website can sign up for another business’s affiliate program and receive special tracker hyperlinks.

When clicked on, these tracker hyperlinks not only send the person to the business’s website but also inform the business which site they came from.

So, if a website adds the tracker hyperlinks to its site and a visitor clicks on one of the hyperlinks, the business they are sent to knows which site they came from.

This type of advertising is known as the affiliate model.

As we have mentioned, many online advertising methods, including the affiliate model, use a payment system known as pay-per-click or PPC for short.

This works as follows:

1. A website displays an advert for another business.
2. If a user clicks on the advert, they are redirected to the other business’ website.
3. The original website will receive a payment for that successful click-through.

As you can see, this means that you only pay for your advert to be displayed if someone actually clicks on the advert to visit your website.

This payment is normally less than £1 per click but can vary a lot.

Search engine adverts allow you to pay a search engine to have links to your website or products appear at the top of the results for certain keywords.

Banner & popup adverts usually appear on the top or sides of a webpage and are often animated to grab your attention.

Email marketing is where businesses use email to send adverts to potential customers.

Pay-per-click advertising is a common payment model for online advertising.

When one website displays an advert for another company and is paid to drive traffic to the advertiser’s site, this is known as the affiliate model.