What is Online Advertising?

Online advertising is a marketing strategy that involves the use of the Internet as a medium to obtain website traffic and target and deliver marketing messages to the right customers. Online advertising is geared toward defining markets through unique and useful applications.

Since the early 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the growth of online advertising, which has evolved into a standard for small and large organizations.

Online advertising is also known as Internet advertising.

A major advantage of online advertising is the quick promotion of product information without geographical boundary limits. A major challenge is the evolving field of interactive advertising, which poses new challenges for online advertisers.

Online advertisements are purchased through one of the following common vehicles: 

Cost per Thousand (CPM): Advertisers pay when their messages are exposed to specific audiences.

Cost per Click (CPC): Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their ads.

Cost per Action (CPA): Advertisers only pay when a specific action (generally a purchase) is performed.

Examples of online advertising include banner ads, search engine results pages, social networking ads, email spam, online classified ads, pop-ups, contextual ads and spyware.

Advantages of Online Advertising:-

1. Reaching Out to More Customers.

- Online advertising can reach out to new potential customers who never set foot into your store and web users from around the globe.

- Social Medias increase awareness of your product to more web users.

2. Cost Effectiveness.

- No other payment is involved in web advertising except paying for the SEO consultant [Search Engine Optimization] and the service provider.

- SEO is a simple activity to ensure websites can be found in search engines using keywords.

- No need in reprinting and redistribution of posters or flyers.

3. Accessibility.

- Information on the Internet is available 24/7 for people to access, therefore they can get information about your product anytime and anywhere. 

4. Fast Improvement on Product or Service.

- The person running the website will be able to see the numbers of visitors, feedbacks, FAQs and etc. This helps give the person information to improvise their advertisement to attract more customers.

5. Target Audience.

- If the product's target audience is mainly the younger generation or the corporate world, online advertising works best due to the increasing amount of these audiences surfing the Internet.

6. Easy Update on Products. 

- Promotions, update on new products, all could be done in a fast and easy way with a few clicks. 

Disadvantages of Online Advertising:-

1. Transaction Issues/ Internet Frauds.

- Information on credit cards and debit cards can easily be stolen. Some people avoid purchasing items online due to the difficulty in accessing the genuineness of a transaction. 

2. Overloading of Ads in a Webpage.

- All advertisers would want to compete to grab web users' attention resulting in a cluttered webpage. Usually, web users would ignore the ads due to the overload of information on a webpage.

3. Pop-up Ads

- These ads are known to annoy web users because it interferes the users activity on a webpage. Many web users ignore these ads or use pop-up ad blockers to get rid of them. 

- It is also like someone who forcefully makes you look at something by "slamming it" in front of your face. It is viewed as unprofessional.