I’ve recently been investigating mobile advertising and have been amazed to discover so many different advertising options available to online advertisers. Here are just some of the different types I’ve encountered…
Banner Ads
These are squares or rectangles containing adverts on a website. They can earn a publisher money either on a pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis. These banners link directly to the advertisers site and so attract potential customers to the advertisers site.
Email Marketing
Companies contact existing customers through email with the aim of both building a relationship with them, and encouraging them to return and purchase more. This can be done through a variety of means including cross selling, rewarding loyalty, up selling, providing notification of special offers etc.
Bridge Ads
These adverts appear as the user moves from one page to another within a publisher’s website. Users don’t request to see these adverts but they are easy to skip if the user would rather ignore them. When clicked they again take the user to the advertisers web site.
Pop Up Ads
These typically appear when a user loads a new page, or after a short time delay when they have loaded the new page. Personally, I find these ads intrusive as they really interrupt what I’m doing but it is this interruption that the advertiser hopes will bring more potential customers to their website.
Sponsorship
In an effort to build brand awareness and win new customers, advertisers often sponsor a site or a section of a site where their adverts appear. Another common type of sponsorship is where the advertiser sponsors a competition held by a site.
Affiliate Ads
Here the advertiser doesn’t pay for the advert to be placed on the publisher’s site. Nor does the advertiser pay when an advert is clicked. Instead, the publisher only gets paid when a user clicks through from the publishers site and actually makes a purchase.When this happens the published (or affiliate) will earn a commission on the sale, typically ranging anywhere from 5% to 50% of the sale price depending on the type of product purchased.
Search Engine Optimisation
This isn’t as clear cut to understand as the types of advertising described above. Here the aim is to optimise your web pages to make them search engine friendly as well as increasing the number of links to your site using a variety of techniques. Both of these have the impact over time of increasing the position of your site for specific search terms in search engines. If the search terms are relevant to the products you sell this will drive more potential customers to your site.
Finally…
I’ve specifically been looking at mobile advertising providers such as Madvertise UK, but I’ve been amazed by how many options are available to those looking to advertise online, and how many factors within those options are important in order to maximize the return on your investment.
