None of the other advertising mediums can measure the behavior of the target audience so precisely, as online advertising. It provides detailed statistics about the number of people viewing an advertisement and the number of those who click on these.

This has led to immense growth, especially for companies like Google and Yahoo. The electronic media like television and radio and print media like newspapers are looking at more ways to specifically measure the response to advertising through these.

Some of the data tends to be inaccurate though, as some of the clicks on the advertisements tend to be fraudulent. The company, in fact, has had to reimburse some of the advertisers.

In addition to that, some users tend to delete cookies from their computers, on account of concerns related to privacy. Cookies are programs that store the user's preferences, besides transmitting detailed customer information to the marketers. This can also affect the accuracy of any premise based upon the marketing related data.

Newer and potentially more accurate methods of tracking, which could do more than compiling statistics for the number of page views and clicks, are always being looked at, therefore. Among the experiments being carried out is one that attempts to understand the type of advertisements that consumers' minds tend to register most easily, by scanning the brains of volunteers, while they are shown different advertisements online. Others include attempts to compile user data, based upon different parameters related to demographics.

Online customer behavior is expected to be mapped in far greater detail than ever before, on the basis of these. As to which of these are likely to be the most appropriate ones, remains to be seen. Some analysts expect there to be some sort of stratification, on account of such developments, when these fructify.

They also expect that towards the top end, there would be websites that can get their customers to share information that could prove useful for the marketing effort, besides attracting and retaining a sizeable number, through an effective promotion strategy, quality and the ability to build up a high level of trust.

Premium rates could be expected to be charged by such websites, for services related to advertising, whereas those that fall in the lower strata are likely to provide such services at rates that would be far more economical.

Formats:

As against banner advertising, advertising related to search has been undergoing growth at a much faster rate, in the recent past, with Google and Yahoo being the leading search engines. Companies advertise against keywords and their advertisements are displayed along with the search-results, when a user searches for those words, on that particular search engine. The payments for these are generally made on the basis of the number of times the advertisements are clicked.

The trend could very well be reversed though, with videos and display banners growing fast, in the near future. In line with these expectations, packaged goods, movies and car advertisers, among other leading advertisers, have been allocating more funds for spending more on such advertisements, in the coming days.

This is, once again, likely to drive home the need for more reliable metrics, besides the important ones already in use, like the number of page views and clicks. As mentioned before, these two have not been found to be as reliable as these were earlier believed to be.

Another challenge is to get the companies with substantial advertising budgets, which spend less than 10% of it on advertising online, to spend more. Although serious attempts have been made in this direction, major success is yet to be achieved.

In order to get Internet users to reveal their interests to the advertisers, besides investing time to view the advertisements, many innovations have been attempted. Examples include advertisements that become active on account of mouse rollover or others that open up into small web pages as the user surfs through or are interactive in other ways. The advertisers can, thus, track the parts of the banner that the users appear to have greater interest in.

Value:

The value of online advertising has been rising consistently and banners on leading portals can sometimes cost about as much for a day as a half-minute spot on leading television programs. Often, such online advertising spots are sold out well in advance.

Social networking websites, though, can benefit from the fact that they have a consistent user-base and offer advertising space at relatively lower rates.

Targeting of the kind that premium online advertising provides, at commodity prices, however, remains elusive, even as efforts are continually being made in that direction.

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