Online Advertising (Ads)

Author: Catalina Goanta

Online advertising can be defined as the industry of Internet marketing/advertising, as well as the technologies (AdTech) and practices characterizing this industry. Online advertising has two important features distinguishing it from traditional advertising: measurability and targetability (Goldfarb, Tucker, 2011). Among the main types of online advertising, we can distinguish display advertising, search advertising, and social media advertising (Goldfarb, Tucker, 2011)¹.

Display ads are mainly used on regular websites and entail the display of banners or audio-visual ads. Search advertising entails that ads are featured at the top of search results returned from a search engine query. Both types of advertising evolved to also include so-called ‘ad auctions’ and ‘real-time bidding’, which involve the buying and selling of advertising via programmatic instantaneous auctions (Information Commissioner’s Office, 2019²; Google, 2020³). Social media advertising uses elements of display and searches advertising, combined with native advertising models such as influencer marketing (see also the entries for ‘content/web monetization’ and ‘influencers/content creators)’.

References

1. Goldfarb, A., Tucker, C. (2011). Chapter 6-online advertising. Advances in Computers, 81, 289-315.
2. Information Commissioner’s Office. (2019). Update report into AdTech and real-time bidding. Available at: https://ico.org.uk/media/about-the-ico/documents/2615156/adtech-real-time-bidding-report-201906.pdf.
3. Google. How the Google Ads auction works. Available at: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en.