Home topics small-business-resources sales-and-marketing Marketing Marketing Demystifying Online Advertising Andrew Lockwood June 16, 2010 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,