Online Advertising

What Does Online Advertising Mean?

Online advertising is a marketing strategy that involves the use of the Internet as a medium to obtain website traffic and target and deliver marketing messages to the right customers. Online advertising is geared toward defining markets through unique and useful applications.

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Since the early 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the growth of online advertising, which has evolved into a standard for small and large organizations.

Online advertising is also known as Internet advertising or Digital Advertising.

Techopedia Explains Online Advertising

A major advantage of online advertising is the quick promotion of product information without geographical boundary limits. A major challenge is the evolving field of interactive advertising, which poses new challenges for online advertisers.

Online advertisements are purchased through one of the following common vehicles:

  • Cost per Thousand (CPM): Advertisers pay when their messages are exposed to specific audiences.
  • Cost per Click (CPC): Advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their ads.
  • Cost per Action (CPA): Advertisers only pay when a specific action (generally a purchase) is performed.

Examples of online advertising include banner ads, search engine results pages, social networking ads, email spam, online classified ads, pop-ups, contextual ads and spyware.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…