Online Advertising1

How to make online advertising more effective. Five studies by ARF, IAB, C|Net.com, MSN and DoubleClick all concluded that online advertising builds the brand (Briggs, 2001, v.1 no 3). Companies will find, however, that the degree to which online advertising improves metrics such as brand awareness, purchase probability and brand perceptions will vary based on the size, placement and format of the ad. Below we will discuss different sizes and formats of online advertising and how the returns from an online advertising budget can be improved. Before a company can determine how to increase the ROI from online advertising, it must determine the goals for its online advertising. This is necessary because online advertising serves different purposes. Online ads can help to increase brand awareness, brand perception and click through rates, while they can also help to increase conversion rates, or the number of people that go to a Web site and actually purchase a product. For an online publication that is concerned with ROI, an increase in click throughs and page views may be the most important performance metric, while a company such as IBM may simply want to increase the number of people that believe it is a technology leader. When an online ad increases one of these performance metrics, it is considered effective. Ad size. As you might expect, larger ads help to improve branding metrics. On average, an improvement of 40 % (for single ad exposure) can be seen in the Skyscraper (160x600 pixels