Aviva Directory » Computers & Internet » Internet » Marketing & Advertising » Display Advertising

This is a guide to online display advertising, which refers to marketing on websites, social media, or apps through the use of banners or other advertising formats, such as text, images, video, audio, or flash.

The intent of display advertising is to advertise brands, products, or websites to Internet users.

According to some industry professionals, more than thirty percent of display ad revenue is taken up by Facebook and Twitter, although it can be found on most Internet venues, including owner-operated websites. Typically, a company's promotional message will appear on third-party sites or in search engine results pages or social networks.

Display advertising can increase the traffic to an advertiser's website, although the chief purpose of display advertising is often to build brand awareness, which can increase sales.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as computer prices decreased and Internet Service Providers expanded their services, more and more people were finding their way onto the Internet. Taking advantage of this new audience, advertisers promoting a product or service began paying web publishers for ad impressions, buying up available space on well-trafficked websites.

In time, these new Internet users began publishing thousands of websites and millions of pages of unsold advertising space. This led to the birth of an industry known as ad networks. These networks served as brokers, buying unsold adverting space from web publishers and packaging them for sale to advertisers. This arrangement helped publishers to recoup the costs of maintaining their websites, and even to earn a profit, and served advertisers who were able to pay a lower price for advertising.

In the late 2000s, real-time bidding (RTB) technologies allowed companies representing buyers and sellers to bid on the price for showing an ad to a user every time a banner ad was loaded. Whenever a page loaded, the ad displayed was the result of thousands of bids from advertisers, based on individual algorithms.

Various display advertising format allow the use of video, rich media, overlays, and interstitials, which are displayed on webpages before the anticipated content is displayed. Sponsorship ads may appear to be an editorial or site logo, although it has actually been paid for by an advertiser.

Ad servers are often used to manage display advertisements. These are advertising technology tools that are responsible for administrating the ads and their distribution. Largely, it is a service that takes all of a company's advertising campaigns and allocates them to various websites, known as publishers. The ad server tracks such details as the dates in which an ad is supposed to be run, the frequency in which an ad is to be spread, and geographic or demographic targeting variables. There are different types of ad servers, meeting the needs of both publishers and advertisers.

In recent years, however, web browsers are provided with the option to block various types of advertising, and some of the more popular browsers come with that option turned on by default. Small publishers are more affected by this than the larger publishers, such as Facebook.

Although the technologies have changed through the years, and we will no doubt see further changes in the future, display ads has an important place in Internet marketing.

The focus of this category is on resources related to online display advertising, and may include websites representing all aspects of the industry, from the ad servers to the ad networks, to services that promise to help advertisers with their display advertising needs, as well as informational sites on the subject.

 

 

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