Saturday, January 06, 2007

Online Advertising: Advertising Units & Options

Following up on my last post where I had explained the terms used in buying of Online Advertising. In this post I am attempting to explain the Advertising units, sizes & Options.

Advertising Units

A digital image is made of basic units called pixels. Advertising Units on the Internet are called "Banners" and are measures & expressed in the same standard measuring unit - pixels. This is also the same unit that measures resolution / screen size of any Computer Monitor. The most commonly used resolutions in India are 800 x 600 pixels and 1024 x 768 pixels. The first number always indicates the number of horizontal pixels.

728X90

300X250


Indiatimes Home Page - 230 X 250

Sections

Advertising units can be placed in various sections of a Website – like Homepage, specific section pages etc.

ROS(Run of Site): This refers to placing ads across different sections on the site on a random basis. Websites take ROS ads for non premium sections / pages of their websites.

Innovations

Publishers offer use of various high impact & innovative advertising units in addition to the normal ad banners. Few such innovative options are:

Site captures / Interstitials: Ad formats that interrupt sequential content, forcing exposure to the advertisement before visitors can continue on their content path. Interstitials are a form of interruption marketing. This quality appeals to advertisers who feel Web advertising needs to be more like a broadcast medium to be effective.
Few Indian sites that allow Site captures are Indiatimes, MoneyControl, Exchange4Media etc.

Pop ups / Pop unders

Expandable Banners: See the following image for example of expandable banner. In this the banner loads as 4 times its contracted size (180 X 150 pixels) and then settles down back to 180X150 after playing the advertisement.


Shoshkeles / Floaters: Browser driven, platform agnostic, sound enabled, free moving forms. These do not require plug-ins, and there is no discernable download for users.

Click here for an example of Shoshkele on Indiatimes.com

In the absence of any standards each publisher is deciding their own sizes. As a consequence, there are just too many sizes of advertisements floating around. There is a need to have few standard sizes to make life simpler for Advertisers & Agencies.

9 comments:

Ashish said...

This was really informative..
You might be interesting in one of my post on demand supply gap in online advertising - here

-Ashish

Premjeet Sodhi said...

Hi! Anurag,

Was good meeting you today and discovering this blog of yours. You will find me a regular visitor here and I hope to get a learning from the interaction.

Cheers!

Al said...

Interesting article on Net Advertising. How does the units and options work as a function of time. Is there a particular time of the day when they can be charged for differentially. Also based on Access regions, can you charge differently --Can space also be personalized /sold based on a personalized access criteria or regions. Do you see some of this happen.

Ankur Lal
ankur@infozech.com

Anonymous said...

Anurag,

Both your posts on online advertisements are quite informative. I am just curious, if you have any statistics or some thoughts to share on the effectiveness of the online advertisements.

~Alok

Anurag Gupta said...

Thanks Cynic & Ashish.

Ankur - Like I said Online inventories are sold in block of thousand impressions. Since the medium allows us to track on a realtime basis which inventory is working how efficiently from which geography & which day part (time of day) - we can optimise an online ad campaign to deliver higher efficiencies.

Alok - Online advertising is much more effective compared to any other medium (TV/ Print/ Outdoor? Radio etc). An online advertiser can measure very easily what his ROI is on his online spends.

Abhiishek's Thought Crucible said...

Hi Anurag-your blog is wonderful, especially to internet entrepreneurs. I am working on a business plan and needed some info on the total online advertising revenues in India for last year-any inputs?

IHR said...

Hi !

I was very impressed by how informative, comprehensive and good looking your site is. So, of course I wanted to contact you straight away about becoming a resource on your site. I look forward to a long and prosperous partnership.

Anirban Das
webmaster@indiahotelreview.com

Anonymous said...

Dear Anurag,

Your blog is really informative and helpful for the guys like us who are just entered into online advertising world. Though we were in same agency (Mediaturf) it was my bad luck that I didn't got an opportunity to work along with you….. But I am regularly visiting your blog posts to gain more knowledge about internet advertising.

Thanks for publishing such wonderful information. Keep posting informative articles
Manish Parkar

Sandeep said...

Dear Anurag,


You have used your own experience to write this blog and its quite useful to others as well, i wants to say you thanks for this