Online Marketing

by Ann Johnston

18% of consumers searched online for the brand's products or services after being exposed to a banner ad. Success from banner ads, however, depends on the company, the industry, the product and the stage in which the brand tries to hit the consumer. How brands rely on targeting also plays a role.

As marketers look to engage consumers -- and to gain better measurement and targeting tactics than what's available with most other media -- they will continue to increase budgets for Internet ads of all kinds, cannibalizing other traditional media spend. The Internet's share of total media ad spending will rise from about 15% in 2010 to more than 20% in 2014.

Conversion Rate Comparison

A large part of the growth will come from video, even in banner ads. Spending for online video advertising will make the format the second-biggest recipient of new ad dollars from 2010 to 2014, according to the eMarketer report "U.S. Ad Spending: How Big Is the Bounceback?" Of the more than $13.6 billion incremental dollars that will flow into online advertising during the next five years, 33% will come from video ads, compared with 44.5% from search.

However, don't expect the online video boom to become as hot as some hype would suggest, according to the report. Annual spending growth rates should hit between 30% and 40%, as brand marketers looking for greater targeting they will shift a portion of their TV budgets onto the Web.

As search attracts more dollars and video gets more growth, banner ads will increasingly become filler for those two ad formats, as well as for other elements of advertising campaigns. And as the market share for banner ads continues to decline -- even in 2014, when spending on banners will make up 20.3% of all the ads on the Internet -- the format will remain second to online search marketing.

Some Interesting STATS

  • According to the new Nielsen Retail 2015 forecast mass supercenters and e-commerce will be the big winners by dollar share gains, growing by a combined 5 share points between 2009 and 2015.

    Nielsen forecasts that supermarkets will continue to lose share, but at a declining rate. While both high-end and low-end niche grocers will grow share, overall share positions will remain fairly low given lower per-store sales compared to larger formats.
  • According to the newly released "What Women Want From the Web Report," Summer 2010, by Unicast, 95% of women plan to go online, and 62% notice and/or interact with online advertising. Women aged 18-24 use the web more than other age groups for all activities except keeping up with news, 53% vs. 67% overall.

    The report found women who visit blogs notice online advertising far more than overall respondents. While this group is just 13% of women who read blogs regularly, it shows females are potentially more open to ads from relevant sources of information that they trust.
  • According to a new study by ExactTarget, based on more than 1,500 consumer interviews, 58% of U.S. online consumers begin their day interacting with companies on Email, compared to 20% who start their day on search engines and 11% on Facebook. Consumers' early morning online preferences reflect key differences in their motivations for interacting with companies across email and social media, observes the report.
  • Reflecting growing signs that the U.S. economy is back, radio delivers its best results in quarter-to-quarter revenue comps since Q1 2007 with a +6% overall increase to $3.687B. This gain represents the highest posted in nearly a decade, according to the recent study by the accounting firm of Miller, Kaplan, Arase & Co. reported by the The Radio Advertising Bureau with more than 6,000 member Radio stations in the U.S. and over 1,000 member networks, representative firms, broadcast vendors, and international organizations.
  • According to Internet Retailer's recent search engine marketing survey of 102 web-only retailers, chain retailers, catalogers and consumer brand manufacturers, 28.0% of merchants report more than 25% of their site traffic stems from paid search advertisements, while 51.5% say more than a quarter of their traffic comes from natural search. Search engine marketing is one of Internet retailing's fundamentals, says the report. Web merchants keep pouring money into advertising on search results pages and on search engine optimization projects to move up in natural search results.


If you find that Online Marketing is something that your company would like to know more about, feel free to contact Central States Media at info@centralstatesmedia.com or on the phone at (309) 693-2345.