Sourced From stuff.co.nz
Published: 19 December 2005
Telecom’s XtraMSN hopes to persuade small and medium-sized businesses to advertise online by selling low-cost pay-per-click advertisements alongside results from the website’s search engine.
Xtra has signed up Overture, a subsidiary of web giant Yahoo, to auction off keywords to New Zealand businesses.
“During the first half of 2003 paid search grew by 300% while the rest of online ad spend dropped by 14%.”
What Is Search Engine Advertising?
Search Engine Advertising is the placement of small text advertisements on search engines. Google Adwords and Overture Search are the two most well known players.
Why Use Search Engine Advertising?
Search Engine Advertising improves your return on investment from online advertising by only displaying your ads to people who are actively looking for your product or service. The placement and creative is triggered by the search phrase the user enters into the search engine and as a result, costs are low and click through and conversion rates are very high.
Written by Jon Ostler – founder of First Rate
Would you use a weapon that fails to hits its target 99.75% of the time? If you are using banner ads to generate traffic then this is exactly what you are doing. The average click trough rate for banners tracked by DoubleClick is now <0.25% so you will get only 2.5 clicks for every 1,000 banners displayed (CPM).
This article is not an attack on the use of banner ads, but rather a review of the good, the bad, and the ugly methods being used by online advertisers in an attempt to generate traffic from banners (or blood from a stone).
Source: emarketer.com
Online ad revenues in the US totaled $2.3 billion in the first quarter of 2004, the highest quarterly total since the companies began tracking the metric in 1996. Aside from the last quarter of 2003, online ad revenues had not surpassed $2 billion since 2000.
Contextual advertising places in real time an ad on a page based on the specific content of that individual page. For example a publisher may have a sports channel and has traditionally sold this placement option with the same ad displayed on all pages in the sports channel. With contextual advertising an ad for tennis shoes would appear on pages about tennis events while an ad for golf clubs would appear on a page about golf events. With a news site this becomes even more powerful due the wide range of ever changing stories and topics covered by each page of the site.