Benefits of online advertising

Online advertising is one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways of driving traffic to your website and promoting your products and services.

What is online advertising?
Simply put, it is using online platforms for paid promotion purposes. These mediums include email, websites, social media, search engines and so on. Online advertising usually takes the form of banners that can be either static or animated. They can also be purely text adverts or other forms of content such as photos, videos or articles. When ads are placed online they usually link to another location that is called a landing page. That’s where users learn more about what is being advertised and decide whether they would like to make contact, buy a product or just share the information.

Why use online advertising?
Online advertising brings advertisers many benefits such as targeting, flexibility, speed, measurements and it is often economical. Advertisers can target a group of people by country, age, gender and even interests. For example, an advertiser can target a Facebook ad to show only female users over 25 with an interest in dancing or even target only users who are celebrating birthdays.

The flexibility factor beats print, radio and television advertising hands down.  Advertisers can easily make changes to online adverts to either get better response rates or correct errors. When the advertiser wants to make a change they can immediately pause the current ad, update it, and upload the corrected ad… sometimes in just an hour or two. Most critically, there are no publishing deadlines to consider!

Online ads are targeted and usually charged based on how many times users see or click the ads, that is cost per impression (CPM) or cost per click (CPC). In essence, advertisers only pay when targeted users are exposed to their advertisement so they get real value for money. The rates are usually very affordable compared to offline advertising.

Measurement capability is perhaps the most beneficial aspect of online advertising. Advertisers can tell how many persons saw their ad, how many clicked on it and sometimes even who clicked on it. They can then use other software such as Google Analytics to find out how long users stayed on the landing page for the advert and if the consumer made contact with the company by sending an email or shared the content – this speaks to the conversion rate of the advert.

Online advertising versus Traditional advertising
Here’s a quick comparison between traditional print and radio advertising and online advertising.