Online advertising expenditure in Australia last year totalled $1,871.25 Million. Search & Directories Advertising (think keywords on Google which is the dominant player in this arena) accounted for 50.5% of this expenditure, General Display Advertising (think banner and video ads) accounted for 26.6%. And Classifieds Advertising (think real estate sites) accounted for 22.9%.
Keyword advertising is what you see when you “Google” something. Advertisers bid on key words such as “home loans”. The more generic the term, the more advertisers will often pay for high demand keywords . The more precise, “home loans in Chatswood” for example, the cheaper the cost.
Sponsored/paid for links appear on the right hand column of the page after a search – and the top two listings that appear after a search are also sponsored links. The placement of these links is determined by relevance and how much the sponsor/advertiser is paying the search engine. Advertisers need to constantly monitor their placement to ensure they are getting what they paid for, and are not paying too much or too little.
In many cases if bought on the right metric display advertising will be cheaper than search. I should declare that our company predominantly works in display advertising but we do also undertake search marketing for our direct clients.
Display advertising was the first iteration of online advertising and can be any size banner ad or video advertisement.
As a general rule, display advertising supports brand based awareness, has a broad reach and can also be used for tactical campaigns on niche sites.
While many of us may search ‘cheap flights to Asia’ via a search engine, a high end, niche, yet high traffic site such as Bloomerberg will also carry tactical offers from airlines targeted to frequent business travelers.
Display advertising is most often used by national advertisers but increasingly we are seeing a trend for mid-sized and SMEs using display advertising with many clients coming to publishers directly without necessarily going via an ad agency.
What’s the cost I hear you ask….. we’ll tackle that in the next article so stay tuned.
Andrew Lockwood is MD of News, Business and Finance website representation firm PostClick.
