Interactive Advertising: Banner Advertisements

One of the first banner ads was introduced in October of 1994 by HotWired and was eventually purchased by AT&T. However, according to many reports, this was not the first time a banner actually appeared on a web page. Many credit the founder of Global Network Navigator, Dale Dougherty, which to many was the first commercial website. Regardless of who created the first banner ad, it has only been in use for roughly 15 years.

While banner ads have fallen in popularity in recent years, it is still important to use a quality banner ad in many instances. Most of the time, the banner ad is the first thing a potential client may come across in regards to your website. A quality banner ad design will often increase your income and provide potential clients with an idea of how your work will look. Most often, it is important that your banner ad be stylish and professional looking. In many cases, you should employ the use of professional design software or contract the work out to a firm that specializes in graphical design.

The main problem with banner ads is the fact that nearly all web users hate intrusive marketing methods. While banner ads are not as intrusive as pop-ups, they are still in many cases unwanted by many users. Banner ads take up space, are distracting (even more so if they are animated), hog bandwidth, and can come off as unfriendly to many users. It is important to weigh the benefits of banner ads with that of the negatives so a balance can be achieved.

Google AdWords and Net Visibility Go Hand in Hand

Late in 1999, Google began testing a program to sell advertisements but instead of using banner ads, Google decided to sell only unobtrusive text ads. These text ads were to be targeted based on what a user searched for in the Google search engine and were also kept separate from the main search results. These text ads were sold on a CPM basis and didn’t generate very much money at the beginning. AdWords was developed in October 2000, and while it still sold ads on a CPM basis, it was very successful. It took Google until 2002 and a new version of AdWords to finally utilize pay-per-click for advertisements which really made the service take off.

The above information is the general history of Adwords and how it began to affect net visibility. AdWords increases visibility by displaying an advertisement that is related to a users query in the Google search engine. For example, say a user searched “west coast fishing.” The text advertisements that will appear will be related to the words searched which gives users advertisements they will most likely be interested in, and provides websites with a means of generating specific site traffic.

Google AdWords increases net visibility, but how does it know what ads to display in relation to a users search? This is accomplished by utilizing key words on a website and imputing these keywords into Google Adwords. Keywords are words or phrases found in a website that when searched by a Google user, will bring up specific advertisements related to what was searched. This helps increase net visibility for a website and also helps to direct users to a site that they may already have an interest in.

Hopefully Google will continue to refine and improve on its AdWords service since it is easy to see just how important of an innovation the AdWords program really is in regards to increasing net visibility.