A Brief History Of Online Advertising With Google
Online advertising is a relatively young medium that has changed how people sell things in our society.
Whether we acknowledge it nor not, the Internet has substantially changed the world we live in.
It affects the way people communicate with each other, the way we learn about almost everything, the way we we find information and most importantly to Internet marketers; the way we shop for goods.
Google’s search engine serves an important role in how people do all of these activities.
- We can find information about almost any subject under the sun using Google’s search engine.
- We use Gmail to instantly communicate with each other anywhere on the planet.
- We use Google online to earn a degree from many learning institutions about almost any subject.
- Using Google and the Internet, we can now shop for almost anything without leaving the comfort of our homes.
In 1994, an advertising revolution began on the Internet when a website named HotWired.com decided to make money on their website and started showing banner ads on it’s web pages.
AT&T was the first advertiser to hook up with HotWired.com to create the 468 x 60 banner shown below.
Compared to today’s standards it was quite ugly but it started an advertising avalanche.
Early online advertising ideas of all types saturated the Internet and a host of start up businesses with high expectations quickly came to the realization that online advertising alone was not going to make them profitable.
After the 2004 dot com crash that sent thousands of Internet businesses and their investors into bankruptcy, several online advertising agencies began testing different advertising models.
Although there were still a lot of problems with pop-up and pop-under ads, online advertising surged.
In 2004, online advertising revenue jumped to almost $ 10 billion dollars a year, from what only ten years before was only a few thousand dollars per year.
Online advertising had become more profitable for online businesses as advertisers learned how to minimize the risk of alienating potential customers with unwanted ads.
Google launched their revolutionary keyword targeted advertising program called AdWords, in the year 2000.
Their advertising program showed only search specific advertisements on Google’s search engine and eliminated unwanted pop-up and pop-under ads.
Online advertising diversified in the 21st century to include news media, television, radio, billboards, emails, social media, mobile and video.
Today, people spend much more time online and for that reason online advertising has become a preferred method for Internet marketers to reach, engage and interact with the public.
Google AdWords can produce successful marketing campaigns that target a specific audience much more effectively than other traditional forms of advertising.
Online advertising campaigns allow marketers the ability to
- Reach profitable specific niche markets
- Reach different demographic groups in different languages
- Reach people throughout the world
- Reach broad audiences in a single advertisement
Google AdWords gives online advertisers the ability to reach 80% of over 180 million people in the United States alone with their network.
AdWords shows only relevant ads to potential buyers that are actively searching for a businesses product or service.
With Google’s analytical tools, advertisers can determine how effective their AdWords ads are performing and fine tune their ads as necessary.
Google’s search engine creator said that “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want”.
Although not perfect, Google’s powerful search engine allows anyone from anywhere to pinpoint the information they want in usually just under one second.
If history is any indicator, online advertising with Google using AdWords and AdSense can only be expected to get better in the future.