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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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Best of 2008 – Series

reflectionpimpexposureSince the end of the year is typically a time of reflection and relaxation, we are going to take a look at our best posts of the past year in this series – Best of 2008.  These posts cover a variety of subjects – from advertising, to blogging and even programming.  We hope you have a peaceful and happy holidays and wish you great success and happiness in 2009.

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Looking Back at 2008 and Ahead to 2009

crystalballbitterjugTaking a look at predictions I made for 2008, it seems they were pretty close to reality.  To summarize:

  • Business websites will increase the range of information they offer offer on their sites, starting to include more audio and video.
  • Business websites will include more user generated content.
  • Community and social networks will be important to the business community.

These may not have been all that hard to predict, but social networking has really taken off in 2008 for business use.  Not only have LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. grown in use, but so have smaller, more niche social networks.

So what about for 2009?

We’ve recently seen Twitter use explode among business users.  There are still some industries where useage is small, so I’d expect Twitter to continue to grow.  Look for it to be integrated into all sorts of social networks, websites and new applications.  While it already has been incorporated into many of these, I think it will continue to be used in new and interesting ways.

Blackberries, iphones, the google phone, etc. have increase competition for very smart phones which allow browsing on the web and interaction with websites via phone applications.  This trend will continue and many larger business sites will start seriously providing mobile versions of their sites and services.  This has already started to happen, but I think the trend will vastly increase to the point that even smaller sites will start to explore this medium.

Due to the recession I think we’ll see more business websites spending a bit more time providing more content – in the form of blogs, video, audio and ways to interact with their customers.  Sales may be down, which means a bit more time to spend on tasks that have fallen to the wayside.

What are your predictions for 2009?

(photo by Bitterjug @ Flickr CC)