What are the basic characteristics of online advertising?

1, the unique advantages of network advertising

The essence of advertising is a sales message for a product or service, network advertising is in fact the use of new media forms of advertising, that is: through the Internet carrier form of dissemination of sales messages. Based on the characteristics of the network, network advertising also has unique features:

1. The scope of dissemination is very large

The scope of dissemination of network advertising is wide, not limited by time and space, can be through the Internet advertising information 24 hours a day, all-weather, 24 hours a day uninterrupted dissemination of information to all parts of the world. At present, there are more than 100 million Internet users in the world and more than 10 million in China, and these user groups are still growing at a rate of 10% per year. These Internet users have high consumption ability and are the audience of network advertisement, they can browse the advertisement information on the Internet anywhere in the world at any time. These effects cannot be achieved by traditional media.

2. Non-compulsory transmission of information

As we all know, newspaper advertisements, magazine advertisements, TV advertisements, radio advertisements, outdoor advertisements and so on are compulsive, and all of them are trying to attract your vision and hearing by all means, and forcefully inculcate them into your brain. Internet advertising, on the other hand, is on-demand advertising, with the nature of newspaper classified ads but does not require you to browse thoroughly, it allows you to freely query the information you are looking for to focus on presenting it to you, which saves your time and avoids ineffective passive concentration of attention.

3. The number of audience can be accurately counted

Using traditional media to advertise, it is difficult to know exactly how many people receive the advertising information. Taking newspapers as an example, although the readers of newspapers can be counted, but how many people have read the advertisements published in newspapers can only be estimated and speculated but not accurately counted. As for TV, radio and road signs, it is even more difficult to estimate the number of people who have read the advertisements. On the Internet, however, the authoritative and fair visitor traffic statistics system can accurately count the number of users who have seen each customer's advertisement, as well as the distribution of the time and geographical distribution of these users, which can help customers to correctly assess the effect of the advertisement and finalize the advertising strategy.

4. Flexible real-time

It is very difficult to change the advertisements in traditional media after they are published, and even if they can be changed, they often have to pay a big economic price. While advertising on the Internet can change the content of the advertisement in a timely manner according to the needs, including, of course, the correction of errors. In this way, changes in management decisions can be implemented and promoted in a timely manner.

5. Strong interactivity and sensory

The carrier of Internet advertising is basically a multimedia, hypertext format files, as long as the audience is interested in a certain product, just click on the mouse to learn more about the further, more detailed, vivid information, so that consumers can personally "experience" the product, Service and brand. If the virtual reality and other new technologies applied to online advertising, so that customers feel like immersive goods or services, and online booking, trading and settlement, will greatly enhance the effectiveness of online advertising.

2, the form of network advertising

The form of network advertising makes full use of the Internet's two major applications: e-mail and the network medium itself. So in fact there are many forms of online advertising.

1. E-mail-based online advertising

E-mail-based online advertising includes direct e-mail advertising, mailing list advertising, and news discussion groups. This form of advertising is relatively cheap according to CPM pricing, but because it is usually done without the user's permission, it is easy to cause the user's resentment and resistance.

2. Network advertising based on online media

Including Banner (banner ads), Button ads, text link ads, pop up window ads and other forms (such as mobile LOGO, online classifieds, etc.). Among them, banner ads are the mainstream form and considered the most effective.

3, China's online advertising development status

China's first commercial online advertising appeared in March 1997, the dissemination of the site is Chinabyte, the advertiser is Intel, the advertisement is expressed in the form of 468 × 60 pixels animated banner ads. Intel and IBM is the earliest advertiser in China to put ads on the Internet. China's online advertising didn't get slightly bigger until early 1998, so the real history of online advertising in China is only two years old.

China's online advertising has experienced several important events:

1. In the second quarter of 1998, the World Cup website of Guozhong.com gave many advertisers who had never done online advertising before the chance to try the uniqueness of online advertising.

2. In the third quarter of 1998, Chinabyte held a seminar on online advertising, which enabled many advertising agencies and advertisers to recognize online advertising.

3. At the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999, PC manufacturers went online on a large scale, and online advertising in China was really launched.

4. In the first half of 1999, advertisers other than IT and telecom went online to advertise, breaking the deadlock of monotonous online advertisers.

5. In the second half of 1999, the second China Internet Contest began, leading to the sponsorship form of online advertising model.

From the point of view of advertising revenue, the three giant sites, Sina, Sohu and NetEase, accounted for half of the country's entire online advertising turnover in 1999. In the past two years, advertisers who advertised online came mainly from two major industries, namely computers and telecommunications. Intel, Lenovo and IBM were the major advertisers in the computer industry. Motorola and Nokia are the main advertisers in the telecom industry.

The effectiveness of advertisements once brought great confusion to advertisers. Advertisers who have been doing online advertising in the past two years may have noticed that while in 1998 it was very common to see click-through rates of 2% to 3% on average creative ads, in 1999 such results have become very rare, with click-through rates of less than 1% becoming more and more common.

Advertising monitoring is a basic and indispensable means of evaluating the effectiveness of advertising. At present, the domestic advertisement monitoring is done through the advertisement monitoring report provided by the website. In order to ensure that the monitoring is notarized and transparent, the major advertising sites have purchased third-party ad monitoring software, with NetGravity being the most common, and of course, there are also those that use Adforce's monitoring service. Real-time ad monitoring is also one of the services available on some of the more experienced sites.

Summarizing the experience of online advertising in the past two years, we have the following positive findings, online advertising is being recognized by more and more advertisers and advertising agencies. The scope of advertisers has slowly moved out of the telecom and computer industries. The turnover of China's online advertising in 1999 was three times that of 1998; new forms of online advertising have begun to appear, and with the good cooperation of Web sites, they have improved the effectiveness of online advertising and strengthened the confidence of advertisers to advertise online.

China's online advertising will enter the primary stage of rapid development in the coming year. But at the same time, we should also fully realize that there are some problems in online advertising:

1. Serious lag in advertising research can not give advertisers and advertising agencies to provide comprehensive, accurate and fair research data; can not accurately understand the Internet habits of netizens; is not clear about the advertisements reached the crowd, regional distribution, and the corresponding number of times, whether it has an effect, and so on.

2. The rigid banner (including buttons) advertising format reduces the effectiveness of advertising, and cannot fully utilize the real effect of online advertising. The monotonous placement of advertisements further weakens the effect of advertisements. In fact, homepage/top bar is not the only choice.

3. In order to increase advertising revenue and capture market share, most websites have chosen the strategy of selling at a reduced price, which has led to record low CPMs for online advertising in China. This vicious competition will only bring more negative impacts to the development of online advertising industry in China.

4. Websites are not doing enough to help advertisers improve the effectiveness of their ads. In terms of advertising strategy, the website is not able to provide advertisers with effective advertising programs; in terms of implementation, the website lacks sufficiently considerate services for advertisers to carry out their advertising plans.

5. Domestic online advertising companies lack the power and scale to compete with global online advertising agencies such as DOUBLECLICK and 24/7MEDIA. Domestic traditional advertising companies to carry out online advertising business is not enough awareness, the pace is slow.

With the diversification of online advertising forms and the complexity of the creativity of banner ads, online advertising can be completely used as a means of expanding brand awareness and enhancing brand image, and in this case, we should care about how much the ads reach the target audience and how often, and for the time being, we can not bother to pursue the ads how many people clicked on them, and no longer for the click-through rate of the high and low lassoed. Of course, the click-through rate is still important for specific campaigns (especially promotions, or invitations to target audiences) where the ads are used as a catalyst to drive the target audience to the advertiser's specific page to receive more information about the brand/product.

After defining the objectives of online advertising, it is important to look for diverse forms of advertising to maximize the effectiveness of online advertising. Diversified online advertising can generally go in the following directions: different from the conventional size of the ads and the placement of the location, bypassing the reading habits of Internet users; more interactive (such as scalable advertising); diversified sponsorship (channels, websites, keywords or activities, etc.); diversified technology applications (DHTML, pop-up pages or transition pages); more fully utilize the unique resources of the Internet: such as BBS, chat rooms, e-mail, etc..