Types of Ads

In very basic terms, advertising means promoting goods and services, through selective forms of media and communication tools. Some of the popularly used tools for ads are newspaper, television, radio, magazines, billboards, leaflets, pamphlets and internet. Ads have been one of the popular methods, adopted for promotion by all types of business owners. With the emergence of newer forms of communication, like the internet and new techniques of advertising, the extent of reach, of the ads has increased like never before.

In today’s competitive world, it is very important to stand out and make a mark in the minds of the people. So, businesses of all types are increasingly making use of ads to make a mark in the customer’s mind

Different Types of Ads :

• Print Advertisement
• Radio Advertisement
• Covert Advertisement
• Mobile Advertisement
• Celebrity Advertisement
• Billboard Advertisement
• In-store Advertisement
• Word of mouth Advertisement

The types of advertising, which you can use for a business depends on the type of products and also the target audience. Other than this, there are various other factors, which will determine the types of ad. All the above mentioned types of ads can be broadly classified into online ads and offline ads.
Offline Ads: The advertisement, which is not done over the web, is called offline ads. It is the traditional method of advertisement, in which people rely more and has been used pretty successfully. Offline advertisement can be done in radio, TV, newspaper, magazines, pamphlets, banner, leaflets, billboard etc. For some products you may have to use just offline ads or online ads or maybe even a healthy combination of both.

Online Ads: any advertisement which is done over the web is known as online advertisement. Various platforms on the web are used for advertising including social networking sites, search engines, websites etc. Among the different platforms yahoo ads, Facebook ads and Google ads etc, are popularly used. Online is not a traditional form of advertisement, and yet many businesses are opening up the concept of using it for the promotion of their brand and advertisement.

Popular Online Ads
The three popular online platforms, preferred for online advertisements are Google ads, Yahoo ads and Facebook ads.
Google Ads: popularly known as Google AdSense, it can help jumpstart your business. Google ads are those ads, which are displayed at the right-hand corner of a Google search page under the sponsored links category. This is displayed every time, when a person is searching for information on the web. Google ads are contextual; say you are searching for the keyword ‘Movies’, the search page will display the relevant information along with the ads. The advertisements can be about related keywords like ‘Award Winning Movies’, ‘Short Films’, ‘Online Movies’ etc. Anyone who is searching for information on movies, might be interested to find about those related keywords

Yahoo ads: is another popular means of online advertisements, used by several businesses. This search engine explores the daily changes in the interest of the public on your brand and based on which, you can find out the impact that your brand has created. Some of the other advertisement solutions provided by yahoo include customer research, measuring campaign impact and understanding the audience etc.

Facebook ads: is a type of online advertising, which allows you to reach out to your customers and expand your business. Most of the people, who are active users of social networking platforms, have their profile on Facebook, so this means that the ads can penetrate to a very large group of people. You can create a page or an event of the product you are advertising and reach out to your target group. People put up personal details like relationship status, hobbies, interests, birthdates, and professional details among a lot of other things. You can use these as the filters and advertise your product to a specific group of people.

Difference between online and offline ads
Both online and offline advertising have their own advantages as well as disadvantages; and have unique differences and similarities as well. As compared to offline advertisement, there is no physical association for the customer with the ad. This means the chances of people forgetting the online ads are higher than offline ads. Knowing your target audience and segmenting them is very important, if you want to get the desired results through both online and offline advertisement. Segmenting the target is easier in online media, than offline media. There are methods and tools, through which you can find out the actual number of views on your online ad. Knowing about the number of people, who saw your ad, might be tough and inaccurate at times in case of offline advertisement. Another major difference which remains is that people believe more what they see on TV than on the internet. Online promotional ads are interactive in nature and this is one major advantage, which business owners prefer to use for the advertisement of their products

Advantage of online ads
There are various advantages of using online ads to promote your business. Depending on what is suitable for your business, you can choose any one; or you can even use both types of advertising in combination. A major advantage of online advertisement is that it is cheaper, then the traditional method of offline advertising. Running a pay per click advertising campaign will be much cheaper, compared to an ad campaign in newspaper or TV. Online advertisement can reach to your target audience, much earlier as compared to offline advertisement. The ads can reach to customers in a matter of seconds, while it may take quite sometimes for the offline ads to reach their intended target audience. Promptness of reaching to the audience can have an impact on the affect of the ad. As compared to the types of advertising, the options are more for online media as against offline media. In offline media, one can advertise in a selected few mediums like newspapers; flyers etc, while for online advertising you can use various options like site sponsorship, cost per click, email marketing, banner advertising, directory advertising among others. Online advertising allows you to choose and reach out, to your target audience in a more accurate manner, than offline advertising. You can choose your target audience in terms of various parameters like age, sex, location etc, which would not be possible for offline ads. Doing online advertisement through Google ads, Yahoo ads and Facebook ads have their own returns. Studies have indicated that the number of people who have signed up on Facebook and access it regularly is pretty large. So, this means that more number of people, in certain categories get to see your ad on Facebook. Depending on what type of businesses they are operating, owners are tying up with online platforms like Yahoo, Google and Facebook to increase their business prospects. Some of them are collaborating with one of them at a time, while some are doing it with two or three of the platforms, depending on requirements.