11:41  

Online Advertising

Photo credit: Wikipedia.org Online advertising serving process using online bidding According to Wikipedia.org , " Online advertis...

Photo credit: Wikipedia.org Online advertising serving process using online bidding

According to Wikipedia.org, "Online advertising, also called online marketing or Internet advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages to consumers."

Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising (including web banner advertising), and mobile advertising.(Wikipedia).

Much like in other advertising media, online advertising frequently involves a publisher who integrates advertisements into his/her online content,an advertiser,who provides the advertisements to be displayed on the publisher's content. The other players in this ecosystem include advertising agencies who help generate and place the ad copy, an ad server which technologically delivers the ad, monitors and tracks statistics, and advertising affiliates who independently promote work for the advertiser.(Wikipedia).

The display advertising process is to a large extent an automated process which involves the interplay of the supply-side platform server and the demand-side platforms. The process by which the online advertising is displayed involves the a complex interaction among many players in the advertising ecosystem, namely the website publisher who selects and serves the ads. The ads may also be outsourced through an advertising agency under contract with the publisher, and served from the advertising agency's servers. The ad spaces can also be offered for sale in a bidding market using an ad exchange and real-time bidding. Information identifying users, such as cookies and the page being viewed, are transmitted to the publisher ad server.

Supply-side platform

The publisher's ad server communicates with the supply-side platform server, offering ad spaces for sale. The supply-side platform also receives the users' identifying information and sends these to a data management platform. The data management platform uses the users' identifying information to look up demographic information, previous purchases and other information that could be of interest to advertisers. Data is gathered from customer relationship management(CRM) platforms, website and paid media content or cross-platform data and such can include data from customer behaviours, actions or interests.

Demand-Side Platforms

The customer information is combined and returned to the supply-side platform which now packages the offers of ad spaces along with information about the users who will view them. The supply-side platform send these as offers to an ad exchange. It is the ad exchange that puts the offer out for bid to the demand-side platforms. Demand-side platforms act on behalf of ad agencies, who sell ads which advertise brands. Hence, the demand side platforms have ads ready to display, and are continuously searching for users to view them. Bidders then get the information about the user ready to view the ad and decide based on that information, how much to offer to buy the ad space.

So, the online advertising process involves the interplay of the supply-side platforms and the demand-side platforms in a complex interaction managing advert content "suppliers" and advert content "buyers". According to the Internet Advertising Bureau(IAB), a demand-side platform has 10 milliseconds to respond to an offer. The ad exchange picks the winning bid and informs both parties.(Source: Wikipedia.org)

Advert display formats include the following delivery methods: web banners, frame ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, floating ads,expanding ads, trick banners, news feed ads,interstitial, text ads, etc.

For a comprehensive review of the Online Advertising ecosystem read this article on Wikipedia.




Now, let's look at some online giants and what platforms they deploy in their digital online strategies. For me, I consider sites that generate web traffic of circa 250 million estimated visits on a monthly basis as an online giant. Amazon.com gets an estimate of 2.5Billion per month, Livescore.com receives about 86 million hits per month while bet365.com receives an estimated 265million visits per month.

Let me reveal some of the advertising platforms employed by the likes of these online giants, not in any particular ranking order. It is good to pursue online strategies employed by giants in your industry or market if you like to succeed in that industry.

You should identify them in the image below