Advertising online can increase your brand awareness and promote a product/service. Online advertising has a major advantage over other types of advertising (tv, radio, print) because it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns.
There are 3 Main Types of Ads:
- Rich Media: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined these as “advertisements with which users can interact” and can include video, sound, animation. Ads which just animate but don’t have any interaction are just display ads (see below). Ads should follow IAB guidelines to maximize impact without being overly annoying (which has the opposite effect from what you want). There are many types of rich media ads, including:
- peel-back
- floating
- expanding
- transitional (interstitial, introstitial, exterstitial)
- video
- popup/popunder
- Display Ads: These ads combine text, images, and animation (but are not interactive – those are rich media – see above) to convey a message. Display ads mostly differ in sizes (see IAB for Ad Size Guidelines). Here are some of the most popular sizes:
- leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
- skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels or 160 x 600 pixels for wide skyscraper)
- banner (468 x 60 pixels)
- half-page (300 x 600 pixels)
- square button (or tile) (125 x 125 pixels)
- medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels)
- Text Ads: Text ads are typically just that, text. These ads typically are cheaper, but have the added bonus of usually being searchable by search engines and are less-ignored by readers than some other types of ads. Some of the more common types of text ads:
- link ads
- contextual ads
- search engine marketing ads (pay per click – ex. Google Adwords)
- online directories