Top 4 Major Categories of Online Advertising

Knowing the differences between various forms of online advertising is important if you want to improve your results. Today, you'll learn about different types of ads that are used to market products and services online.

Text Ads

Text ads are small rectangular boxes that appear at the top of the search results page. These ads are created by advertisers, and Google places these ads on behalf of advertisers. Advertisers set the maximum bid they’re willing to pay for each click, and Google does the rest.

Advertisers pay to display their ads in premium format. (Premium indicates that the ad is of higher quality than other ads, typically displayed in larger fonts.) Typical texts consist of three parts: headlines, descriptions, and their respective sizes of the ads that follow them.

Headlines describe the topic of the ad in one or two sentences. It’s often up to three sentences. The main purpose of this is to test the interest in the advertised product among potential buyers.
Descriptions make up a little more than half of the ad. They describe the features of the advertised product in a few sentences with short examples. This part doesn’t have much purpose other than to persuade the viewer to proceed with a purchase.

Finally, the ad’s size is another factor that affects its position in the search results. High-quality ads are sized with a fixed number of characters. Below are some examples:
To avoid copyright issues — sometimes both parties involved in the ad-serving agreement (ad network and Google) require that the ad copy be in the public domain, and sometimes both parties agree to include copyrighted text, which makes the ad invalid. “Android’s stock search engine is based on nearly 100 million ads...These 100 million ads serve as the basis for search results, how we develop products, and what we learn from the users.” [Chang, Li, & Lee (2016), “Android’s Search Function”]
Ads start appearing a few days after an ad equipment network ( including Google, Facebook, and Bing ) approves it. Those that appear last are sent to the ad server where they’re stored until they’re needed again. Text ads are small rectangular boxes that appear at the top of the search results page.

Banner Ads

Banner ads are one of the most common types of digital ads. Banner ads are rectangular image or text ads that are placed on top of other content, like a website or an app. Banner ads can be static images or moving videos.

Basics of Banner Ads Banner ads are tricky. You can’t just attach any image or the program can’t figure out what you want it to display. The banner has to be of appropriate size and action text needs to be appropriate to the ad.

There are usually 3 categories of banner ads. These categories serve as guidelines to help designers select banner ad assets:
LazyBanner doesn’t use a specific size rule. Unlike with pop-ups, you can place a full-width banner anywhere on the screen. This makes banners super simple to implement as well as scalable.
A full-width banner has the largest advertisement area that developers can use. This also makes it visually simpler as there are only 3 basic shapes that a designer can create.
You can place both static and animated “banner” advertisements on your site and/or app. These ads can have different sizes and triggers:
You also need to display beneficial or unmissable ad content. Advertisements that provide information to users can be useful. However, it also doesn’t hurt to run a couple of ads that are either immediately annoying or have an alternate needs trigger.

Other positive effects of lazy banners include:
The banner image needs to have a “usable” size so visitors can effectively interact with it. As of now, most banner ads display websites or apps in landscape orientation. We can expect more designers to provide text-based banners that are horizontal.
Banner ads can be dynamic too. They can feature a countdown or other triggers which can communicate better to users what exactly is happening. For example, ads that run a lap timer or a countdown to a specific event should provide further details.

Video Ads

Video ads are short, entertaining video clips that you can use to promote your products or services. Video ads can be uploaded to YouTube or embedded on your website. You can also use video ads on Facebook. Video ads are cost-effective since you can create them yourself using free or low-cost video-editing software.

Video ads are a viable and cost-effective strategy to drive traffic to your website or online store. You can set up your video ads from scratch or use pre-made content.

Creating a great video ad can take as little as ten minutes or as long as four hours. To create a good video ad, you should:
Once you have these things down, you’ll have a successful and cost-effective ad strategy. Video ads work on any device, so conversion work will probably be the most difficult because most people like to watch on their phones.

YouTube is the #1 video-sharing website with over 2 billion registered users. If you’ve joined YouTube recently, you can use the button to upload your videos in the “Upload” section of the YouTube home page.
When you click the upload button, you can choose whether you want to use the pre-designed ad format or create a custom video ad (you’ll find this option under “Video Types”). This is how YouTube creates a video ad.

To dramatically increase the efficiency of your YouTube ad campaigns, you learn by doing. Here are  helpful tips that can make the process of creating a YouTube video ad more efficient:
To add more currency to your video ads, upload the ad footage to YouTube with a few seconds of description. According to research, text-based descriptions perform better than video descriptions. People will read the description, and then imagine the ad content. This technique of adding currency to your video ads will boost engagement and can raise your conversion rates.

Social Media Marketing Ads

Social media marketing ads are simply a way to promote your social media profiles to an audience that may be interested in what you’re offering. They’re also a way to reach out to an audience on a large platform that they use every day. This is something to always keep in mind. The way I have found to use social media for sales is to target an existing audience that uses that social media platform (Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc.), or to create a community where the people that use that social media platform have a voice in the creation of the content for that platform.

Keep in mind that proper planning is necessary for any advertising category. Use our ROAS calculator to estimate the required spending for desired conversions for better decision making

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