Banner
The first and relatively widely used type of online products online is a banner ad. You may have noticed a strip (horizontal or vertical) highlighting a particular company’s name, services, and tag line at the top, bottom or sides of the web page. This is a banner ad and its size depends on the space that the company gets on a website.
Pop Ups
This is another quite a familiar type of online advertising. When you visit a particular website, you are sometimes warned by your browser about it having blocked a pop up. At other times, as soon as you enter a website, before you can view the content you wish to, you are made to view a pop up ad of a particular company. This type of is considered invasive and hence browsers are enabled with blockers.
Email or Newsletter
Using email and newsletters can be termed as merely an advancement of snail mail. Following the same principle of picking random postal addresses, email ads target email addresses that may have been entered on a site that may cater to a need the user may have felt at some point of time or completely random ones. Newsletters however are mostly sent to those users who subscribe them.
Video Ads
You are sure to have come across video ads at least a couple of times a day, if you’re an avid Internet surfer. These ads are quite similar to television commercials. They are in video format and need to be loaded and played when clicked. These are high quality videos and are very popular on video sharing websites.
Classifieds
Noticed classified ads in newspapers? Well, now just put that on a web page, and you have the same effect, just in color and a little bit more attractive. These companies too have to buy ad space on a web page, just like they do in newspapers.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
By far, the most widely used and quite effective method of online advertising is the Pay Per Click one. This system will generate and display ads that are based on what information the user has entered in the search engine. For instance, if you happen to be searching for shampoo, immediately above the search results, you’ll see links taking you to a hair care website. Revenue is generated, as the name goes, per click. It can be very useful for making money, but needs to be managed rather carefully.
Floating
A rather annoying form of online advertising (and I say this only because I’ve experienced it myself) is a floating ad. These ads will actually ‘float’ over your content, or above or below it as you view the web page. They will hover until you close them. But do they get your notice? You bet!
Takeover
This type of online advertising does exactly what its name suggests. It ‘takes over’ the web page and consecutive pages of the same website all throughout your duration there. It begins as a huge ad on the first page, and the ad, in various sizes and forms keep reminding you about it!
Contextual Ads
The next time you enter a search phrase in your search engine and get redirected to a website, notice the ads that appear on the sides, top or bottom of the page. If they’re related to what you’ve searched for, then the advertiser most probably uses the contextual form of advertising, which involves browsing the content and search phrases to generate relevant and related ads.
Roughly stated, these are the most popularly used types of online advertising. So, if you’re looking to advertise on a website, you can decide what the most efficient way to get to your target audience is. And if you’re simply browsing through, you know what form of advertising you’re seeing on numerous websites!
