Web advertising the pros and the cons Online advertising spend is forecast to grow dramatically over the forthcoming years. In the UK alone Jupiter predicts the market is set to almost double from £139 million in 2000 to £252 million in 2001. This is driven not only by the rapid growth of internet penetration and usage but also by corporate marketing departments realising that it has some very real advantages over traditional offline advertising. The traditional model, if there is such a thing, of online advertising is based around the number of views of the banner itself. Advertisers are charged on a CPM (Cost Per mille) basis that ranges from £15 through to £50 or £60 at the top end. A £15 CPM rate means that the advertiser pays £15 for every thousand views of the banner, irrespective of the number of clicks. Many commentators judge the success of a banner campaign by the click through rate associated with it. This in turn is measured as a percentage of those viewing a banner who actually click on it. As I will argue later in this article this should not be the only criteria to determine whether a campaign has indeed bee n successful. So what are the advantages to online advertising? There are two primary advantages; it is completely trackable and adjustments to the campaign can be made in real time. The success of a traditional advertising campaign is largely subjective in terms of awareness and brand building. Take a poster campaign, for example, aimed at driving traffic to a web site. The number of users delivered to that web site by the poster advert cannot be measured accurately. This problem compounds itself when an offline campaign is undertaken across various mediums in terms of assessing which medium has been the most successful in meeting the objectives. Conversely, on line advertising is completely trackable. The cost per user/customer can be ascertained not just from the medium as a whole but from individual sites themselves. This enables marketing departments to plan more effectively and also makes their agencies more accountable! The other major advantage is that campaigns can be optimised in real time. If a certain banner are not delivering the right click through rate the creative can be changed immediately or moved to another web site and new creative tried. Imagine trying to deliver something similar in a bill board campaign. Another major advantage is the targeting available through online advertising. Offline media placement is based largely on the socio-demographic profile of each media owner with a given medium. Online advertising, for example, allows one to buy certain keywords in search engines. For example, if your business is recruitment your web site can be targeted through buying keywords such as 'job' or 'recruitment' so that when someone keys in such a search into an engine up will come your banner. In that way you know that the person viewing your advert is genuinely interested. It is important to dispel one theory of online advertising. Success cannot just be measured by the click through rate alone. Click through rates remain only one way of assessing it with awareness and brand enhancement, similar to offline advertising, being the other key components. Recent research by Andersen Consulting pointed to the fact that many people actually visit a web site having viewed a banner without actually clicking on it. It is well documented that click through rates have fallen substantially since online advertising started, wit h the average now being approximately 0.4% in the UK. This click through rate itself can be driven up substantially with close media targeting and effective creative, driven by an innovative use of technology. Online advertising will continue to evolve beyond pure banner advertising. We're seeing the emergence of other forms of online advertising such as sponsorship, interstitials (Graphics which pop-up in a separate window) as well more technologically advanced forms of banner advertising, known as 'Rich Media'. No doubt the arrival of broadband will help this metamorphosis, making video footage easier to transmit. It is important to remember early black and white TV commercials and see how sophisticated comparable TV ads have become: online advertising will follow a similar path but will evolve more rapidly due to the speed of internet penetration. << BACK