Eyeball Click Action!

There are many ways to drive the internet traffic to a business website that are free of charge. However, they are as a rule time consuming. Paid online advertising campaign can be a good option, as long as the business owner has a reasonable budget.

The three main types of online advertising are search engine marketing (SEM), banners and advertising on social media.

Search engine marketing is by and large associated with Google AdWords, and to a lesser extent with Bing Ads as well as other search engines.

This type of advertising uses CPC (cost per click), also known as PPC (pay per click) model. The ads, in the form of text, are served in the search results page at the very top and on the right-hand side of the organic search results. The advertisers pay per click, every time a visitor clicks on their ads, as a consequence visiting their website. The reasoning behind this type of advertising is that businesses are talking to the internet users who are already half- converted: the visitors are looking for exactly the products or services that the advertisers offer, with the ads displayed after they initiate a search for specific key terms in the search engine.

Google AdWords, Bing Ads and similar self-service platforms also offer content marketing, usually based on CPC model. In this scenario, ads  which may be either text ads or display banners  are not served in the search results pages, but on a variety of big and small websites that have subscribed to showing third-party ads.

Banner advertising proper is older than search engines and entails advertising directly on a relevant (usually high-traffic) website, as opposed to going though AdWords or Bing Ads, though the results can look similar.

Banner ads can be static images, flash animations, videos, and so on. While some host websites (publishers) are ready to sell the space on their web pages on CPC basis, most go with the CPM (cost per thousand impressions), or PPM (pay per thousand impressions) model.

This means that the advertisers pay for their ad to show up a certain number of times, regardless of whether anyone actually clicks on it. As the advertisers pays for exposure based on visitors to the website or the number of eyeballs, this type of advertising is considered better suited for branding than for promoting a specific product.

Affiliate marketing uses a CPA (cost per action) or PPA (pay for action) model. In this type of advertising, the advertiser only pays the publisher if someone clicks on the ad and completes a specific transaction, which can be a purchase, a subscription to a newsletter, and so on.

The success of this type of marketing depends on the advertiser's ability to develop a good network of affiliates. The bobshop affiliate programme is an example of this type of online advertising and marketing.

Social media type of online advertising is gaining popularity in recent times, because many people are using such websites, and because a person who viewed an ad may talk about it to the people they are connected to, thus widening the ads reach. Social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, have opened their platforms for advertising and are (naturally) doing their best to limit free exposure for businesses in favour of paid promotional campaigns. At the end of 2013, Google+ also started moving towards paid social advertising (though the ads will be not be served on Google+, but on Googles display network).

Typically, advertisers on social media platforms can choose either CPC or CPM model to see which ones work better for them, or which ones work better for specific campaigns and for specific groups of users.