Business advertising

Online advertising is the buzz word now-a-days amongst advertisers and businesses trying to appeal to masses and it ought to be, with 1.14 billion people worldwide having access to the internet and number continuously growing day by day, online advertising provides an unlimited potential for businesses of all kinds to expand their client base and boost their profits. From a kid to a teenager and from an adult to a sixty year old man everyone uses internet to access relevant information about various products and services, thus internet allows a opportunity to market your product to the masses and the only way you can tap into this is by online advertising.
A major factor contributing to the rising popularity of online advertising is the fact that compared to traditional media; online advertising is far cheaper and can produce almost immediate results. And in online advertising you get to appeal to people who are interested in your products by placing your ads on the sites offering products/services relating to your field and also you can select keywords for which your ads will appear on search listings and optimize your site according to the keyword specific to your business, so that it features in top search listings.
Compare this to the traditional media where you can just make a blind guess as to whether the product you are advertising for reaches intended audience. Take for example a television advertising, there are good chance that you are appealing to audience in which majority are not interested in your product or cannot afford it or even they changed the channel while your ad was telecasted or perhaps no one was present when your ad appeared. In fact according to Greg Stuart of Interactive Advertising Bureau, every year around $220 billions of advertiser's money worldwide, is spent on ads that reach wrong audience or no audience at all.
Now on the contrary if your ad appears on the websites and relevant to your field of business and in search listing for keywords relating to your field, then you can be sure that at least you are targeting the audience that has already shown interest in the product/service related to your field. This could be the biggest plus offered by online advertising as it allows you to select the criteria for which you ads appear and that too at a lower cost compared to traditional advertising.
Some may argue that the cost advantage held by online advertising will not last longer as it becomes more popular marketing tool and an increasing number of businesses take plunge into online advertising. They might be right but online advertising has many other factors that make it more of a viable option. In online advertising arena you can appear to specific audience not only on the basis of keywords but also on the basis of geographies. Thus you can have your product appeal only to the audience in a particular geographical region in the world. So online advertising not only allows you address a broad audience but it also allows you to address specific audience in a particular geographical region.
Online advertising reveals right information to the relevant audience instead of just blindly targeting a broad audience. Also unlike traditional media where advertisements are considered nuisance by user, online advertisements tend to be considered more of a source of information. Thus propensity of an user clicking on your ad is higher if your ad appears to be a source of relevant information an user is looking for.
With more efficient and constantly improving internet technologies you can realistically track the number of users visiting your sites after clicking on your ads, Google adwords is a very good example of this. Thus instead of empty guesses you can have realistic estimates about the effectiveness of your advertisement. So now a company can allocate their advertising budget more appropriately rather than just allocate an arbitrary amount, not knowing whether it can produce measurable returns or not.
And all these factors are contributing to rising popularity of online advertising and increasingly more and more companies are looking towards increasing their spending on online advertising. In fact according Interactive Advertising Bureau online ad spends hit $17 billion in 2006 and are set to rise even higher in 2007, so for those of you thinking that online advertising is hot, its set get even hotter.