Online Advertising and Marketing - Essay Example

Individual project 2 Internet advertising is a rapidly rising business. Companies are now spending billions of rupees towards internet advertising. Companies are now adopting new features of internet advertising. There are several hot trends in internet advertising. Companies are adopting those trends to improve their ROI. This repot will take a look at the current hot trends of internet advertising, the upcoming new trends in the industry. It also discusses about the several harmful effects in the world of advertising which a web user has to look at. The overall idea of this report is to develop an expertise in online advertising which will be beneficial to the marketers. Introduction Internet advertising is a multi-faceted thing. Just as print advertising comes in many shapes, sizes, colours, internet advertising also comes in wide range of variations. It is message which is mediated across the internet to persuade the web visitors into taking action which will increase their profitability. Over the years there has been rise in expenditure of online advertising by companies. They have come to accept the importance of online advertising in reaching out to wide range of consumers. Internet today is accessed even in the remote corners of the world. Hence advertisers are looking for internet marketing to reach out to wider range of customers. But the web users have to face many problems like Link Bait, Continuous Pop-ups, Viruses and Worms. With rise in globalisation advertisers are looking forward to using internet as the medium of communication to the target audience at a lower cost. Discussion Part 1: Best Practices The hot trends of Internet marketing are Pay per click It is a type of online marketing. In such types of advertising, people click on the paid search ads. People generally click on this more than any other form of digital advertising. In such cases people don’t mind to click on such ads as long as they can get their queries answered which fulfils their needs. Here the advertiser pays the publisher to the website which is usually the owner of the website when an ad is clicked. In search engines the advertisers usually bids on particular keywords which are relevant to the target market. Here the owner charges the advertisers a fixed price on the basis of number of clicks insured of any bidding system (Mordkovich and Mordkovich, 2005). Banner ads The most popular form of internet advertising in the history of internet advertising is the static advertising known as banner ad or display. These kinds of ads are similar to print ads which are shown in newspapers and magazines. The Click through rates (CTRs) in case of banner ads is very low. Its average rate is less than around 0.3 %. This signifies that consumers don’t pay much attention to such ads and only a small fraction of such ads are clicked by the users. But it does not indicate that established brands don’t benefit from such kind of advertising. Brands may achieve increasing level of brand awareness through such form of advertising. Even though consumers choose not to click on such ads, it helps in culminating in top-of –mind awareness. Hence it enhances the brand equity. Viral marketing The word Viral signifies the effects of multiplying just like a virus does in any computer. Hence viral marketing signifies any strategy which encourages individuals to pass on marketing messages to its friends. Then his friends pass on the messages to their own friends. Like this the messages reaches many people which creates the potential for exponential growth of the message’s influence and exposure. It takes the advantage of rapid multiplication of the messages to reach thousands and millions. Display advertising Display advertising is a kind of internet advertising where there is presence of logos, text, images, photographs, location maps and other similar items. Such kind of advertising don’t use audio or video. The main advantage of such kind of advertising is that one can use all sorts of creativity to make an impact on the consumer. Next news stars on the horizon are design of the websites, videos and ads since design sells. For example Apple is the most valuable company of all time and it is its design that powers it values. Marketing is going visual. Visual marketing is getting hotter with explosion of info graphics. The use of Mobile to connect with the users is also getting accepted worldwide. Next the use of cloud based tools has resulted in efficient use of internet marketing. The last is the use of social media to reach out to its consumers. The trends in online advertising are the use of mobile advertising. According to a study it was seen that the mobile ad spend in 2012 was $ 1. 6 billion and in 2013 it was $ 4.4 billion. It was estimated to up by $ 9.6 billion by 2014. The Ad network Space will get Consolidated to help companies like Google go for acquisition of companies like Admob which drives up the direct ad network space. Twitter Ads expands to third party twitter clients like Hottie, Twitterific desktop version, Twidere, Tweet Lines etc. Part 2: The Ugly Side of Online Ads Link Bait Link Bait is the concept of creating interesting content for the Web to create maximum buzz in the Internet. The main aim is to attract as many people to visit the site as possible. It exists in many forms. Creating a good content is the basic feature of link baiting technique. There are many types of content hooks like News, Humour, Controversy, Information, Games, Software and Widgets. All of the above form of link bait has one thing in common. It is that they promote one’s name, brand and site. A feature of great link bait helps in accelerating site recognition and link building. Hence when it is done in the right way, it can become extremely viral (Jerkovic, 2009). Continuous Pop-ups When any user visits a site, sometimes he faces popups in the website which affects this viewing the content. Pop ups are a way to nag the user and let him visit the site which they want. Originally pop-up advertising was done to advertise illegal download illegal software. But nowadays they are a common feature on major commercial websites. They advertise anything like car insurance, real estate property, cell phone ringtones etc. The ads get triggered whenever a user navigates to a page or whenever he moves his mouse over a portion of a page. This causes the ad banner to pop up in the foreground. Like this the advertisers forces the visitor to see their advertising. But they are considered intrusive by the user. Web surfers feel as if they are forced to read an advertisement when they are trying to read or view any content on a website. It causes annoyance to the users. Some include blinking lights which can be harmful to some users with some medical conditions. Hence they are often regarded as the most hated form of internet marketing (Levine, Young and Baroudi, 2011). Viruses Computer viruses are software programs which are designed to spread form one computer to another. They basically interfere with the operations in a computer. While surfing internet, a computer virus may corrupt or delete data on a computer. A computer viruses use the email program to spread to other computers. It can even erase all the data on a hard disk. Such kind of viruses is often spread by means of attachment of an email. Hence it is advisable that one should never open an email attachment unless it is from a trusted source. Worm Computer worms are one of the most dangerous and destructive form of malware which exists on the internet. Unlike viruses where the users have to take action to infect a computer, worms require inaction to spread. Computer worms are self-replicating programs which takes the advantage of any security holes in hardware and network. Such kind of worms’ exploits vulnerabilities which already exists hence the users do not have to action to infect it. Part 3: Analytics (250 words) Analytics software is a tool which is used to collect and display data about the website users who are visiting sites. There is both free web analytics software as well as paid or proprietary software. One can use any one of them to analyse the data. Free analytics software helps to get an overview of the software package. It gives a glimpse of the overview of the software. It is useful for one who wants basic use of such data like analysing the number of visitors from a particular country. Hence for those who want to do basic operations for them they can us the free software. It gives them a glimpse of the actual software package which they can expect. Hence without any cost they can do basic operations. But for advanced features like Real-time data, HTTS compatibility, Campaign ROI, Email reports, Events per Visit, Time spent on Page, Visitor Path, Most Popular pages, Visitor Details, Report stats interval, etc. they will need paid web analytics software (Kaushik, 2009). It will help them provide with a detailed report, which will give them insight into the actual use of the software. So by paying more people can use the software to correctly interpret web traffic and help create more effective sights to increase its ROI and web traffic. Hence the cost associated with free web analytics software is limited access to wide range of functionality while the cost associated with paid one is the purchasing cist. The benefit associated with free web analytics software is limited, but the benefit associated with paid software is huge. Hence after doing cost benefit analysis of both of them, it is advisable to use the paid web analytics software. Conclusion Internet advertising is a multi-faceted thing and it comes in wide range of variations. It can be seen that there is many techniques which the online advertisers must use to improve their Return on investment. Online advertising has many hot trends like banners, pay per click etc. The trends in online advertising are the use of mobile advertising. The Ad network Space will get Consolidated to help companies like Google go for acquisition of companies like Admob which drives up the direct ad network space. Twitter Ads expands to third party twitter clients like Hottie, Twitterific desktop version, Twidere, Tweet Lines etc. It is seen that online advertisers should use many of the above techniques to improve their efficiency. References Jerkovic, J. I., (2009). SEO Warrior. Sebastopol: OReilly Media, Inc. Kaushik, A. (2009). Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Levine, J.R., Young, M.L. and Baroudi, C. (2011). The Internet For Dummies. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Mordkovich, B. and Mordkovich, E. (2005). Pay-per-click Search Engine Marketing Handbook: Low Cost Strategies to Attracting New Customers Using Google, Yahoo & Other Search Engines. New York: Lulu.com. Read More