Definition of Online Display Advertising

Display advertising (banner advertising) is a form of advertising that conveys a commercial message visually using text, logos, animations, videos, photographs, or other graphics. Display advertisers frequently target users with particular traits to increase the ads’ effect.

A new world with an increasingly connected consumer

According to studies & research, as of 2012, there are 17.5 million active internet users in Malaysia. The top activities conducted by users online are reading or sending email, using a search engine to find stuff and of course interacting with communities with shared interests on social networks such as Facebook or twitter.

This represents an enormous opportunity for companies to reach out to a technologically savvy audience who is continuously interacting with the world wide web for various interests.

How do advertisers know who to target?

In order to uniquely identify anonymous users, online advertisers today tend to make use of cookies, which are unique identifiers of specific computers, to decide which ADs to serve to a particular consumer. Cookies can track whether a user left a page without buying anything, so the advertiser can later retarget the user with ADs from the site the user visited.

As advertisers collect data across multiple external websites about a user’s online activity, they can then combine this information to create a picture of the user’s interests to deliver even more targeted advertising. This aggregation of data is called behavioral targeting. Advertisers can also target their audience by using contextual and semantic advertising to deliver display ADs related to the content of the web page where the ADs appear. Retargeting, behavioral targeting, and contextual advertising all are designed to increase an advertiser’s return on investment, or ROI, over untargeted ads.

As advertising needs become more sophisticated, display ADs can also be personalized based on a user’s geography through geotargeting. Basic information such as a user’s IP address can indicate a user’s rough location with a limited degree of accuracy. This information can be supplemented further through the use of a phone’s GPS or the location of nearby mobile towers to have a clearer indication of the user’s current position for a mind boggling array of advertising possibilities.

What’s the difference between Paid Search Ads and Display Ads?

What’s the difference between Paid Search Ads and Display Ads?
In digital marketing, two strategies to get advertisements in front of and interacting with potential clients are often discussed: Display Advertising and Paid Search Advertising. Without any more information about these two kinds of advertising, the difference between them might be confusing. However, they are unique from each other in a few specific ways. While they are both forms of digital advertising designed to drive traffic to your website (which can be tracked through the impressions, click through rates, and conversion rates on ads and advertising campaigns) the advertising formats differ in placement and appearance.

Paid Search Advertising works within popular search engines to make it so that your text-based ads appear within search results for specific keywords, typically at the top, bottom, or side of the page. Advertisers pay for specific keywords and then bid for placement on the page. Display Advertising looks a bit different. Instead of relying on only the text to drive traffic, Display Ads use other forms of media like pictures, videos or sound. These forms of media are used to catch the attention of the potential customers who is not necessarily on a search engine looking for things related to your business.

These advertisements are also found in slightly different locations, like on specific webpages that have been selected because they relate to your business or are frequented by your target audience. In both cases, the purpose of the ads being created is to elicit clicks and drive traffic to your website. Differences in the appearance and location of these ad types means that each kind of advertisement might perform better for different kinds of businesses within different industries.