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Best of 2008 – Types of Online Advertising

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

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Finding Twitter Influencers to Follow

influence4rbReader Steven Woods had a great question that I think might be useful to others, so I’m sharing it in a post (thanks for the question,Steven!):

Have you seen any good tools for understanding who is the most influential in a given subject? Measurements and/or ranking of network/relevance/retweets?

Here are a few tools that can help find the influencers for a subject or in your network:

Mr. Tweet will analyze your network and followers and suggest who you should be following back as well as influencers outside of your network.

TwitterGrader will give you a suggested list of people to follow based on keywords in your own tweets.

Twellow won’t necessarily give you influencers, but it is a directory of tweeters by subject, so it can help you find people in an industry to follow.

TweetScan, TwitScoop, TweetDeck and Twitter all give you the ability to search on a keyword and see what people have said about it. I happen to monitor a few keywords using TweetDeck and have found it useful for finding new people to follow and connect with.

If anyone has any other tools or methods, please feel free to share.

(photo by 4RB @ Flickr CC)

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Online Customer Engagement Findings

cscapelogoAs a followup to yesterday’s post on online customer engagement, reader Sarah Woodbridge suggested taking a look at cScape’s report on Customer Engagement.  The report is well worth a look (and it’s free!).  They’ve been producing a report for 3 years so they have a bit of historical data as well.

Customer engagement is widely seen as a way of deepening and enriching a product or service offering and a method for gaining customer insight.  – The cScape Online Customer Engagement Survey Report 2009

Here are some of the key findings:

  • Only 42% of organizations surveyed have a defined customer engagement strategy in place
  • 41% of respondents said that deteriorating economic climate has resulted in a greater focus on customer engagement
  • There’s interest in creating relationships with customers to increase the long-term customer value and also to increase the value delivered to the customer.
  • Most organizations feel that sensitivity to price is a key customer behavior that will have to be addressed in the next 12 months (48%).
  • Email newsletters are the most likely tactic to improve customer engagement (59%).
  • Web 2.0 and social media such as user ratings & feedback (41%), user-generated content (37%), blogging (36%) and social networks (36%) will also be used to engage customers.
  • Very few companies (5%) have a strategy that uses mobile channels.
  • Lack of resources continues to be a barrier to successful customer engagement.
  • About a third of companies site problems with technology as a significant barrier to cultivating better customer engagement.

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