Introduction to online advertising

Since the beginning of the worldwide web businesses realised that placing adverts onto popular websites can be a way of making additional money and increasing the awareness of a brand or product.

Careful online advertising can help your business make money. Depending how you implement the advertising you may need to have a reasonable technical infrastructure to back up the advertising system, or you may be able to do it for next to nothing by relying on a website provider to do the work for you.

Advertising online

In a small business we all look for ways of generating an income. One such way is the placing of adverts onto your website which provide a “click through” capability. This means that someone visiting your website finds a product or company of interest, clicks on the screen and gets put through to the provider’s website.

Some website providers and hosting companies will often offer you cheap web hosting or other services if you agree to have adverts on your site.

Types of website advert

There are many types of adverts that can sit on your web site:

• Pop ups and pop unders are adverts that do just that.
• A banner ad is a graphic or animation that will sit on your site, often at the top hence the word banner.
• A trick banner can be designed to look like an error message or Windows dialog box, to encourage users to click onto it.
• An interstitial ad is an advert that will appear on your screen before any content does.
• An expanding advert will alter size on the screen and may change some of the background content as well.
• A floating ad will move across the screen or “float” in front of content.

Many guide users will see the descriptions given here and realise just how annoying, irritating and off putting these adverts can be. Having adverts that appear before content is very frustrating, and having an advert dressed up as a dialog or error message is deceiving and extremely rude to your users. Many regular web users have developed an ability to ignore most website adverts so their effectiveness can certainly be questioned in many instances.

How are revenues generated from adverts?

As is the way on the web all sorts of creative methods have been dreamt up to charge for advertising and hence pay you some money for hosting them.

The most common way of being paid is to agree a cost per thousand which basically means that you will get paid for each thousand people that view certain pages on your site. Note that this does not mean these people need to click onto or otherwise acknowledge the advert in front of them.

Cost per click advertising uses this system, so that each time a user clicks onto an advert you receive an agreed sum of money. The amount you receive will vary, but it will only be pennies, if that, per click.

Cost per conversion is the other end of the spectrum where you will receive payment based on someone coming from your site and actually buying a final product or service.

As you can see online advertising is all about the numbers of visitors to your website. For this type of advertising to work you need to create a site that is very popular and preferably targeted on a set market place or industry.

To build such a compelling site will take a lot of time, energy and commitment.

Should I host online adverts?

Hopefully by now you will understand the nature of online advertising. For a small business the chances of you building a massively popular site that will attract the quantity and quality of visitors you need to support decent advertising revenues are very slight.

If a service provider offers you a cheaper web site hosting deal if you agree to support advertising think long and hard about the offer. You will have little if any control on the adverts that will end up irritating your users and customers and probably damaging your brand. It would probably be preferable to pay extra and have an advert free site that you have full control of.

What next?

For further access to information and advice on using ICT in your business, contact Business Link by:

• emailing: myict@businesslinkwm.co.uk
• calling: 0845 113 1234
• visiting: www.businesslinkwm.co.uk

Alternatively, click here and complete a simple form to request a call back from a Business Link Adviser.

Commercial suppliers

We do not recommend specific products or suppliers; instead we provide you with a representative sample which covers the range of suppliers/products available. You may choose to look at these suppliers or products but this is entirely at your discretion.