It will not take a hard look for you to spot more than a single advertisement put up in your surroundings. They are the first and last things you see every day. You wake up, surf the web—you will already encounter at least a dozen of them during a five-minute scroll. You will not even notice how many ads you will encounter on your way to work because it has become a normal part of your daily life. Today, however, more we are exposed to more ads online than we are offline. This is due in part to stay-at-home orders preventing us from bumping into offline ads.
If we were to take down all advertisements plastered on billboards, inside public transport, walls, etc., our surroundings would look close to bare. There also seems to be an overload of digital advertisements online, and in today’s world, digital ads make up most of the web pages and applications we use. Do you ever wonder where they got their start?
A Brief History
Would you be surprised if we told you that with the number of ads all over the internet, online advertising got its start only twenty-six years ago? It is actually a considerable fact, knowing the world wide web became public only three years before the birth of online advertising.
The start of online advertisement’s journey was when the first ad was posted on the 27th of October in 1994. It was posted on Wired’s website, a monthly American magazine that publishes in print and digital. They focus on the effects of emerging technologies on culture, economics, and politics.
The online ad was for telecommunications giant AT&T. It was posted in the form of a banner. It was rectangular, graphic, and stretched the length of a web page on either the top or bottom parts. AT&T paid thirty thousand dollars for the banner ad to be displayed at the top of Wired’s site for three months. From then on, online ads started popping up in different forms.
Online Advertisement Today
Online ads, since its first appearance in 1994, have come to deliver itself in different types. Marketers and consumers alike might find it hard to differentiate between these types, but we will explain the ones we encounter every day, such as:
- Google Search Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Twitter Ads
- Google Display Ads
- Pay-Per-Click Ads
- Mobile Ads
- In-game Ads
- YouTube Ads
Google search ads appear with search engine results when you look for something on google. Whatever the keyword you use, there will be more times when you will see a Google search ad than not. Something all Facebook enthusiasts encounter is Facebook ads. They come in varieties and are typically appear with a headline and an image. Clicking on them will naturally lead you to pages outside the social media platform.
Twitter ads are tweets and accounts that are promoted by Twitter. They can be profiles of businesses, individuals, and organizations. They can be distinguished by looking for the “Promoted by company name” text. Similar to Facebook ads, they target their registered users.
Noticed the rectangular banners placed within the YouTube videos you watch? Those are called Google display ads. They can be text, images, and videos that play together with the video you are watching.
The cost of pay-per-click ads or PPC ads depends on the number of clicks the ads receive. This type of online advertising is used by businesses to generate leads and sales. Typically, the use of a PPC management company is preferred by businesses when it comes to using this type of online advertisement.
Got a smartphone? If yes, you are probably no stranger to mobile advertisements. Social media platforms, websites, and applications use these to have their businesses reach users with mobile devices. They can come through push notifications, banners, etc. These days, they even have their own distinct alert sounds.
For gamers, in-game ads are routine. Video games are also places for digital advertisement. You will see them inside the game itself while you progress.
Another Google product is YouTube ads. The video-sharing website has come to be a place for companies to give themselves visibility. The Google-owned website has two billion users as of 2020, and over seventy-nine percent of internet users have YouTube accounts. This makes the platform an ideal place for online ads. The ads come as the classic banner ads, in-video overlay ads, and in-stream video ads—the ones that play before and during a YouTube video.
Now that we have given you an overview of the online advertising world, we recommend you pick the best ones for your business needs. Do note that the age of social media rewards advertisements visible to them, making the perfect online marketing strategy an integral part of your business growth.
