Advertising companies spend billions of dollars annually to attract customers to their products. Many schemes of marketing are woven and marketing strategies are evaluated to get the perfect match or nearest to it so that set targets could be achieved. The U.S. advertisers spend around $40 billion annually for online advertisements. This much expenditure is explainable when these ads are actually seen, but when around 31%, which means more than a quarter of them are not even seen online then it does amount to waste of money. In monetary terms, it means losing $12.4 billion without getting required results.
This is the average across all the U.S. sites, which means that for a particular site the amount and percentage could be different. For some sites, only 7% of their ads were in view. The ad visibility is important and it depends on the construct and development of a website. Each year the amount spent on web advertisement rises higher and this year it is up by over 20%, which means that for the first time online ads expenditure will be more than print magazines and newspapers ads. This at least rationalizes the reason why online ads are being spent on by companies.
Image Source: mashable.com
However, this does not take out of the equation the heavy wastage of money that brands are facing due to invisibility of ads on the pages that a site visitor never views. The reason being that a user both ignores an ad and moves on before it gets loaded or does not bother to take notice of what is being advertised in the first place even if an ad gets loaded. Another dilemma that only online advertisement and marketing poses is that on average 4% of ads were delivered to viewers outside a target zone of geography, which means that they have been seen by people where a product is not even sold. This percentage could be as high as 15% for some of the websites.
Furthermore, the online marketing campaigns get complicated when ads are run next to news articles that worn against a product being advertised. This ratio is 72% for the U.S. websites. According to the CEO of comScore Dr. Magid Abraham, this compromises the ad campaigns and is burdensome on publishers. Never the less, over the next five years, the online ad growth will slow down as has been predicted by the online marketing analysts.
However, the need is for the online marketing strategies to get better so that they reach their intended target audiences. There should be a technology for website advertisement which would maximize upon product campaigns by increasing their visibility and enhancing their possibilities of being fitted into the web content next to which they are being sold.