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1. Our next lesson covers the main items for online
advertising. Advertising is probably the most important
promotion tool for big brick-and-mortar companies.
However, with a SEM businesses, advertising is only a
supporting factor. The problem is that the majority of SEM
businesses lack the scale to be able to effectively contact
large numbers of prospects and clients. Furthermore,
there aren't many places on the Web where prospective
clients come in flocks. Therefore, advertising is largely
PPC-oriented.

2. Actually, online advertising is advertising on the Internet.
This particular form of advertising is a source of revenue
for an increasing number of websites and companies.

3. A significant number of firms, from small businesses to
multinational corporations, incorporate online advertising
into their marketing strategy. Online advertisements
typically involve at least two separate firms: the advertiser
or agency which purchases or sponsors the advertisement
and the publisher or network which distributes the ad for
display. Because of the close relationship between
technical innovation and online advertising, many firms
specialize in both. For example, most search engines
couple their search service with an advertising program,
exploiting the benefits of keyword-based search
technology by including ads in search results.

4. Let's look closer on the most popular online advertising
form as traditional banner. PPC advertising form will be
explained in details in 8 lessons of our next Step.

5. Traditional BannerA Web banner or banner ad is a widely
used form of advertising on the Internet. This kind of
online advertising entails embedding an advertisement
into a Web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a
website by linking them to the advertiser's website.

6. Generally the advertisement is constructed from an image
(GIF, JPEG, PNG), JavaScript program or multimedia object
employing technologies such as Java, Shockwave or Flash,
and often employing animation or sound to maximize
presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape.
Banners are usually placed on Web pages that have
interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an
opinion piece.

7. The Web banner is displayed when a Web page that
references the banner is loaded into a Web browser. This
event is known as an "impression". When the viewer clicks
on the banner, the viewer is directed to the website
advertised in the banner. This event is known as a "click-
through". Many banner ads work on a click-through
payback system.

8. At the base of a click-through system are mathematical
calculations of the number of users (users clicking on an
ad) divided by impression number. We remember that the
term impression means the number of times the ad was
delivered. For example, if your banner ad was delivered
100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on
it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%.

9. It should be noted that banner ad click-through rates have
fallen over time, often measuring significantly less than
1% and choice of an appropriate advertising site with high
affinity is very important crucial factor in this situation.
Personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive
ads typically have higher click-through rates than standard
banner ads.

10. When the advertiser scans their log files and detects that a
Web user has visited the advertiser's site from the content
site by clicking on the banner ad, the advertiser sends the
content provider a small amount of money (usually
around five to ten US cents). This payback system is often
how the content provider is able to pay for the Internet
access to supply the content in the first place.

11. Nine Common Banner Ad Mistakes to AvoidBanner
advertising expert Rob Frankel advises e-marketers to
avoid the following mistakes when creating their banner
ads:

12. Overloaded. Too many colors. Too slow to load. Too hard
to read. Nobody wants to grow old waiting for your
banner ad to load. Frankel advises designing banner ads
that will load and view easily with last year's technology.
"Personally, I design pages for people running no more
than Netscape 2.0 on the equivalent of a 486 running at 66
MHz and 256 colors," says Frankel. "That means your art
should still be no deeper than eight bits, unless you're a
true minimalist and can bring it in at no more than four."

13. Unattractive. People like good-looking stuff. What works
for Cindy Crawford can work for you, too. So if you're not
a digital Da Vinci, find someone who is and pay him or her
a few bucks to make your banner look great.

14. Too many bells and whistles. Just because technology
offers you bells and whistles doesn't mean you have to use
every one of them. Chances are that the average Web
surfer has been through several sites before he or she gets
to your banner. Give the reader a break. Don't overdo
motion, movement, or message changes. And allow some
time to digest what you're displaying.

15. Illiteracy and illegibility. These are the ads that make you
scrunch up your face and twist your head trying to make
some sense out of the illegible scrawls that some
knucklehead thinks are cool. But prospects don't care how
cool you think it looks. If they can't read it, you've lost any
chance of their clicking on it.

16. Missing link. Your banner looks great but isn't linked to
anything. That's a mistake that anyone should be able to
detect and prevent with a simple check.

17. Link errors. Your banner looks great. The link works...
directly to a 404 message (meaning the requested Web
page was not found). Maybe this one isn't your fault.
Maybe your webmaster inadvertently forgot to tell you he
or she switched servers. But even if it was the
webmaster's fault, who do you think will catch the blame?
Keep checking those banner links every few days.

18. Weak message. The same things that make good ads make
good banners. Unfortunately, the same things that make
bad ads make horrible banners. If you don't know how to
write and design a clever, compelling message, hire
someone who does. Nothing turns off poten-tial prospects
more than a really stupid attempt at being clever, an
offense usually committed with the aid of a bad pun.
Remember that your ad is a representative of you,
containing a smattering of your personality and ability. If it
looks dopey to a viewer, guess what they're going to think
about you? It's better to be clear than clever.

19. Confusing message. Your banner looks pretty, but nobody
understands what the heck you're talking about. This is
the number-one mistake made by do-it-yourselfers.

20. Boring banners. One common mistake is that your banner
doesn't compel your recipients to respond within a certain
time frame. Without a deadline, there is no immediacy to
act, which means they scroll away until they forget it.

21. Web banners function the same way as traditional
advertisements are intended to function: notifying
consumers of the product or service and presenting
reasons why the consumer should choose the product in
question, although Web banners differ in that the results
for advertisement campaigns may be monitored real-time
and may be targeted to the viewer's interests.

22. The evidence shows that Web banner ads are restricted by
high cost and limited physical banner area. Let's look at
the Marketplace section of SearchEngineWatch.com:

23. Out of 10 advertisers only 3 are in the SEM services
business. These companies - BruceClay, KeywordRanking
and MoreVisibility - are the largest players in the industry;
they have enough wherewithal to run these ads and
enough resources to satisfy a large flow of traffic.

24. Pay per click advertisingPay per click or PPC advertising is
an arrangement in which webmasters (operators of
websites), acting as publishers, display clickable links from
advertisers, in exchange for a charge per click. As this
industry evolved, a number of advertising networks
developed which acted as middlemen between these two
groups (publishers and advertisers). Each time a (believed
to be) valid Web user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays
the advertising network, who in turn pays the publisher a
share of this money. This revenue sharing system is seen
as an incentive for click fraud.

25. Though many companies offer pay per click system as one
of their services. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search
Marketing (formerly Overture) and MSN AdCenter are top
players in this field.

26. As far as PPC advertising is the first advertising option for
any new on-line businesses it became one of the dominant
and widely used marketing tools.

27. What you should remember:

28. A Web banner is displayed when a Web page that
references the banner is loaded into a Web browser. This
event is known as an "impression". When the viewer clicks
on the banner, the viewer is directed to the website
advertised in the banner. This event is known as a "click-
through".

29. Banners should be placed on Web pages that have
interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an
opinion piece.

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