Online Advertising

1. Search Engine Adverts

Search engines are a big way of advertising online because a huge quantity of traffic to a website is gained through search engines. In fact, well over 50% of website traffic comes from search engines.

Many companies pay thousands of pounds performing search engine optimisation to get their website at the top of the search engine results pages. This is because if you’re at the top of the search results then you’re more likely to be seen and visited so you can sell your products or services.

However, you can also pay a search engine to have links to your website appear at the top of the results for certain search keywords.

With these search engine adverts, you will normally only pay the search engine when someone clicks on the link. This is known as pay-per-click. This payment can be as little as a few pence per click but could be as much as a few pounds, depending on how popular the key terms you choose are.

2. Banner & Popup Adverts

Banner and pop-up advertisements are adverts that usually appear on the top or sides of a webpage and are often animated to grab your attention.

Many services will automatically change the adverts on a website to ones you are particularly interested in, based on your browsing history. This way users of the site are more likely to see an advert for a product that is relevant to them and will increase the chances of a successful sale.

However these types of adverts are often unpopular with internet users as they are normally brightly coloured and animated which can be distracting.

Banner & pop adverts also normally use the pay-per-click model of payment.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is where businesses use email to send adverts to potential customers.

This is best when sent to customers who have specifically requested for these emails. An example of this is when you sign up for a website, they often ask if they can send you emails to advertise products that you might be interested in.

However, often unsolicited bulk emails are sent out to people, this is known as spam. These spam advertising emails don’t target products you might be interested in but rather send the advert to a huge number of people in the hope a few people might buy. Products sold through spam adverts are normally not legitimate products.

4. Affiliate Model & Pay-Per-Click

Many businesses that sell products online run affiliate programs to get other websites to advertise their products.

A website can signup for the affiliate program of another business, and they will receive special tracker hyperlinks. These tracker hyperlinks, when clicked on, don’t just send the person to the business’s website, it also informs the business which site they came from.

So if a website adds the tracker hyperlinks to their site and a visitor clicks on one of the hyperlinks, the business that they are sent to knows which site they came from so that they know who to pay. This type of advertising is known as the affiliate model.

As we have mentioned, many online advertising methods, including the affiliate model, use a payment system known as pay-per-click or PPC for short.  This works as follows:

1. A website displays an advert for another business.
2. If a user clicks on the advert they are redirected to the other business’ website.
3. The original website will receive a payment for that successful click-through.

As you can see, this means that you only pay for your advert to be displayed if someone actually clicks on the advert to visit your website. This payment is normally less than £1 per click but can vary a lot.