Introduction

Advertising is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to purchase or take some action upon products, ideals, or services. It includes the name of a product or service and how that product or service could benefit the consumer, to persuade a target market to purchase or to consume that particular brand. These messages are usually paid for by sponsors and viewed via various media. Advertising can also serve to communicate an idea to a large number of people in an attempt to convince them to take a certain action.

Internet advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web for the expressed purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, interstitial ads, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam.

One major benefit of online advertising is the immediate publishing of information and content that is not limited by geography or time. To that end, the emerging area of interactive advertising presents fresh challenges for advertisers who have hitherto adopted an interruptive strategy. Traditional media, in today's highly competitive world, has proved to be insufficient in fulfilling any advertisers' exacting standards - of efficiency and customer interaction. The interactive Internet is the solution to the requirements, since it is a two-way interpersonal communication medium, with key distinguishing factors of feedback and interaction in real time. It is Interactive, Interpersonal & Cost effective - these are but a few of the many advantages that the Internet, as advertising medium offers. The Internet offers unlimited low cost space compared to the expense and limited capacity of traditional media and the ability to accurately measure audience usage. Every day millions of new users spend increasing amounts of time online. And that's where the opportunity lies - for every minute spent online is an advertising opportunity for you. Internet advertising is very similar to TV and radio advertising. The programs are offered as a free service; commercial advertising pays the expenses. The same is true of Internet advertising. The information is free, with the costs defrayed by advertising. A major advantage of Internet advertising is the ability to attract a specific target audience. This advantage is limited or nonexistent in other forms of media advertising. With the Internet, ads are directed towards the right group of people. Internet ads are known as banners. Virtually all banners are links to other sites, but there are still those few that are just meant to be seen, like billboards. One advantage of Internet advertising is that it opens new possibilities to spread messages to a targeted audience. By advertising to a particular group, chances of success are indeed great.

How Internet Advertising works?

There are various Internet advertising techniques:

The ad owner pays a fixed amount for each person who visits the page with the ad.
The ad owner pays a fixed amount for each click on an ad that links to the advertisers' web site.
The ad owner pays a fixed rate to have his advertisement posted for a specified duration.
The ad owner has the option of either promoting their product or service through survey based contests on our site.
 Benefits

You control the market by targeting special sections. Prestige comes from your position on our site. Your customers receive your information. Increased traffic justifies your internet investment. Brand loyalty leads to increased sales and return customers.

Advantages of Internet Advertising:
Ease of Use

For advertising in a newspaper you have to buy the ad space well in advance. You also have to hire an advertising firm to design the ads for you. And to manage all this you require an in house team too. If you are a small business that has started only recently, then it is difficult for you to focus on anything but survival. Another thing is cheap or wrong ways of advertising have a bad effect on the brand value of the company. On the other hand, to advertise on the web all you need is a little knowledge of the web and a website. There are many websites that are dedicated to bringing together advertisers and web publishers. One such service is Google Adwords which is very popular and effective. You have to open an account with them and provide all the details of your product or service and they will take care of the rest.
Value for Money
Firstly, the web advertising rates are much more reasonable than any of the traditional media. Moreover, on the web you do not pay for merely placing your ad, you pay only if people click your ads and visit your site. This system is known as pay per click advertising. This is a much fairer system than the conventional advertising system. On some top websites you do have to pay them just for letting you place your ads but even in this case the Internet advertising costs are more reasonable than placing the same sized ad in a top newspaper.

Better Feedback
This is like the USP of online advertising. You can see real time statistics of any website before advertising on it. Its page views, unique visitor count, subscribers, etc. can be accessed by an advertiser before paying his hard earned money. The immediacy of the feedback is also very high in case of Internet marketing and advertising. After starting an online campaign your site analytics will give you the measure of its effectiveness in real time. This is one of the best advantages of advertising on the web.