Technology Behind Ad serving

The future is a number of Digital and Networked Media

The above picture shows us how technology is changing from analogue to digital.  Now in the market "n" number of digital devices are available and people are becoming crazy about digital world.  However time has changed so fast, now a days digital face is changing into networked digital, where each entity is connected through some medium.  This is what required in online advertising where medium is connected and we all can serve ads through these medium.  Below are the different types of online advertising and technologies to serve the purpose.

1) Display:  There are two types of display advertising.
               a) Classified advertising:  This type of advertising includes putting banner all over the places, billboards,logos, photographs or similar types of items.
               b) Web Banner advertising: This is mostly related to internet world.  It is graphical advertising on the internet that appears next to content on web pages, IM apps, email box, etc. These ads, often referred to as banners, come in standardized ad sizes, and can include text, logos, pictures, or more recently, rich media.

2) SEM (Search Engine Marketing): Before understanding the meaning of SEM, we will take a look on below:

     Search Engine: An internet-based tool that searches an index of documents for a particular term, phrase or text specified by the user.  Commonly used to refer to large web-based search engines that search through billions of pages on the internet.

Common Characteristics:
- Spider, Indexer, Database, Algorithm
- Find matching documents and display them according to relevance
- Frequent updates to documents searched and ranking algorithm
- Strive to produce “better”, more relevant results than competitors

Examples of Search Engine:
Google, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves etc.

How does Search Engine Works:

- Spider “crawls” the web to find new documents (web pages, other documents) typically by following hyperlinks from websites already in their database
- Search engines indexes the content (text, code) in these documents by adding it to their databases and then periodically updates this content
- Search engines search their own databases when a user enters in a search to find related documents (not searching web pages in real-time)
- Search engines rank the resulting documents using an algorithm (mathematical formula) by assigning various weights and ranking factors

SEM: It is one of the form of internet marketing that involves promotion of websites to increase their visibility in search engine results pages.  If you want to have more traffic on your websites or blogs then you can use this technique to promote your website or blog.  This is basically happens through page ranking, the higher the ranking more chances to promote your website.

Why SEM is important:

- 85% of all traffic on the internet is referred to by search engines
- 90% of all users don’t look past the first 30 results (most only view top 10)
- Search engine traffic is low and websites are not indexed because they are generally poorly optimized
- Cost-effective advertising
- Clear and measurable ROI
- Operates under this assumption:  More (relevant) traffic + Good Conversions Rate = More Sales/Leads

3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO): It is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
Following diagram shows process of SEO and how business requirements.

4) Email Marketing: It is direct way of marketing a commercial message to a group of people using email.  By using this:

- enhances the relationship with customer and it increases the possiblity of repeat business
- by adding advertisement to email messages to customer

5) Newsletter Marketing: Newsletter marketing has evolved into one of the most powerful cost-efficient strategies when communicating with your customers and prospects. Newsletter marketing gives you the ability to send a beautifully designed, well-written document, filled with valuable information, to all those who have opted in to receive it. Whether keeping your clients updated, announcing important news within your company, or alerting your recipients of close-outs and special offers, e-mail newsletter marketing does it all. Bottom line, newsletter marketing gives you an active and personal path of communication with your clients and prospects, as it keeps your brand name continually in the front of their minds.

The Advantages of Newsletter Marketing

There are so many advantages and reasons you should be adding e-mail newsletter marketing, to your marketing mix. Here are just a few:

1. Reaching a global community. The internet has given us a 24/7 worldwide pathway into every country, all over the world, without limits. Within seconds, your newsletter is received in a mailbox in NY, while simultaneously arriving in China. No delays, no special fees. Whether you have 100 customers or 5,000, staying in touch with them is always critical. E-mail newsletter marketing harnesses the power of the internet making that possible.

2. Newsletter marketing is cost-effective. Why? Because a newsletter marketing strategy can be measured using states to show:

    An increase in sales or leads
    Cost acquisition of new customers or clients
    Cost retention of up selling to former or existing customers or clients
    Campaign results in order to adjust and improve future e-mail newsletter marketing campaign strategies

3. Interactive content. Whether video, audio, graphics or music, using interactive newsletter marketing is growing day by day in its appeal and design. Keeping your reader engaged, must be approached tastefully, and not overly done. No one wants to see flashing icons and crazy moving text, which is hard to parse, when trying to read. All content and design needs to be carefully planned and tested.

6) Video Advertising:  The term video advertising encompasses online display advertisements such as MPUs (300x250 ad size) that have video within them, but it is generally accepted that it refers to advertising that occurs on Internet television. It is served before, during and/or after a video stream on the internet. Online video marketing is a premium form of advertising that is becoming a key way to build brands. The 2012 IAB report showed growth of over 46% year on year meaning that the sector is now worth £160 million.

There are three types of video advertising, pre-roll, mid roll and post roll.

7) Viral Marketing (Mouth publicity):  This is one of the interesting way of marketing.  No one can control this type of marketing, this marketing some way profits the advertiser or deviates it's customer.  I think we are well aware of this type of marketing and we all are part of this advertising, so no strange here :)

8) Classified Advertising: Small advertisements placed in a newspaper or online with some system of classification. Classified advertisements are typically small and they are cheaper.

9) Pop Ups and Pop Unders: It is one of the form of advertising over the internet, intended to attract web traffic or capture email address or survey. Popups and pop-unders are small windows that are generated by a web page when it is opened or closed. They come in many different shapes and sizes, typically in a scaled-down browser window with only the Close, Minimize and Maximize commands.  The basic difference between these two is “pop up” on top of the web page you are viewing and pop-unders are less flashy than popups as they open behind the web page you are viewing.

10) Landing pages (Conversion/re-targeting) :  Usually this type of advertising needs to have some transaction.  This can be achieved through re-targeting by placing tracking pixel at landing pages.  In other words it's one of the pricing model where the advertiser pays for each specified action - this could include (but not limited too): an impression, click, form submit (e.g, contact request, newsletter sign up, registration etc), double opt-in or sale. This type of advertising is not specifically intended to target specific users or products.

11) Lead Generation: It is one of the way of marketing, where products or services are delivered with the intention to get consumer interest into products or leads some business.  Lead generation is the process of creating sales leads which might convert into sale for the company. The leads may come from various sources or activities, for example, digitally via the Internet, through calls, through advertisement and list purchase. Companies may also rely on referrals, telemarketers, and advertisements to generate leads.