The ongoing but unwritten contract between advertisers and consumers has always been the delivery of value after advertising. That is to say, ads are seen as a form of compensation to cover the costs of producing a show/product/value. As an example of this, when watching free to air television we accept advertisements mixed into broadcasts as a form of compensation for watching a ‘free’ program, these advertising dollars are then reinvested in delivering additional content and thus the cycle continues. The Internet is no different and the acid test for advertisers is how their placements compensate or add value to the users Internet experience.
Search marketing (SEM) and the Google ranking algorithm (quality score) is a great example of where paid advertising ads value to a consumers Internet experience. Google quality score modifies the search results to rank advertisers in order of relevance to the given search query, thus allowing users to find what they are looking for quicker; improving their experience. As trends have shown, this is growing on consumers and sponsored link clicks are growing quickly (up to around 33% of internet users use SEM links regularly.)
The Google content network (websites that allow Google ads) has long been criticised for delivering a low ROI due to lack of targeting. Contextual matching was introduced to improve this by matching ad content to only relevant text, for example travel ads within news articles about travel or holidays. Although this was a step in the right direction, understanding a website in the right context across dialects, cultures & countries is very difficult for a mere computer. Addressing this problem Google retargeting offers the ability to serve up much more targeted advertising. Click the hyperlink to find out more about it.
Josh Strawczynski’s Opinion: I would not go as far as to suggest that poor placement of banner ads (for example) will do irreparable damage to a corporate identity, but advertising efficiency and the return on investment should certainly be taken into consideration. Where an ad placement is high targeted and relevant to the consumer, we will always see a better return than the less targeted alternative.
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