Floating Ads – An Overview

A floating ad is a type of rich media Web advertisement that appears uninitiated, superimposed over a user-requested page, and disappears or becomes unobtrusive after a specific time period (typically 5-30 seconds). The most basic floating ads simply appear over the Web page, either full screen or in a smaller rectangular window.

They may or may not provide a means of escape, such as a close button. More sophisticated versions can come in any shape or size and include sound, animation, and interactive components. Floating ads use a variety of technologies, such as a combination of Flash and dynamic HTML (DHTML), and may have the ability to display differently according to the user's browser capabilities. United Virtualities and Eyeblaster (Mediamind) are two advertising media companies that offer floating ads.

Floating ads grab the viewer's attention and tend to be more interesting to view than other formats. The Boston.com Web site recently featured a highly successful campaign using United Virtualities' Shoshkele ad, in which a Boston Globe delivery truck drives on from the left and crosses the screen, with newspapers flying out of the truck to houses in the background. When the truck drives off the right side of the screen, a small rectangular ad floats up to the right top corner, offering 50% off home delivery.

According to a How Stuff Works article about Web advertising, a floating ad generates a click through rate of about 30 clicks per thousand impressions, similar to the rates for pop-up ads and much higher than the cited 2-5 clicks per thousand impressions for a banner Ad. Although the floating ads don't necessarily generate more clicks than pop-ups, they are thought to be more memorable and have a greater branding effect as a result. They often include tracking capabilities that report not only the numbers of clicks to the ads, but the number of times users reload a page to see the ad again.

Benefits of Floating Ads

1. Floating ads have proven to increase brand exposure through the delivery of visually engaging, high impact content that 'floats' above your publishers' web pages. The prevalence of the floating ad in recent years is attributed largely to the high impact it delivers.
2. Publisher is given full control over positioning and layering attributes. By specifying screen coordinates and z-index as parameter values passed to the Mediaplex ad tag, the publisher can effectively optimize the delivery of the ad so it refrains from obscuring or interfering with their site’s core content and other layer elements.
3. Publisher may control the timeout of the floating ad to comply with their own specifications. 

Source: searchcrm.techtarget.com and www.mojorichmedia.com

Disadvantages of Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

Like with anything else in internet marketing pay-per-click advertising would have its own set of pros and cons.

Internet marketing is getting more and more competitive each and every day. Because of this reason, why a lot of marketers are finding various types of marketing campaigns for their products and services. Pay-per-click advertising is both easy and quick to put into operation. It also has the potential to be an extremely cost effective means of advertising, but only if approached with the right strategy and knowledge.

As easy as it is there are still many online marketers who seem to give up at the first sign of difficulty without realizing the wonders of pay-per-click advertising. We hear the similar issue all the time from new marketers: “How come my click-through is not converting?”

As good as it seems pay-per-click advertising has its own set of disadvantages and drawbacks. Let us go over some of these things so that at least you have a better picture of pay-per-click advertising.

Easy

You might be thinking that being an easy strategy should not be a disadvantage. There are two sides to this, yes, it is true that pay-per-click advertising is easy to get going, however it does not mean that success is on your side right away.

Before you fall into pay-per-click advertising you have to do careful keywords research to ensure you are not going to be part of an overflowing market. A sorry excuse for a copy will surely affect your ad’s ranking which means you are spending unnecessarily.

Click fraud

To explain this in non-technical language, click fraud happens when your competitors click on your advertisements because eating up your budget. Click fraud in per-pay-click advertising can be done by an actual person or it could be done by a program that is designed to click on ads without detection.

Be sure that you check the conversion rate of your pay-per-click with each search engine that you use. After getting this information drop whatever it is that is not doing well and save some money in the process.

Do not go thinking that since Google is the biggest search engine right now that you should only use that. It sure is big but together with that, there is a lot of competition. You stand a better chance of getting conversions if you use small pay-per-click programs, and not to mention it is less expensive.

Poor keyword research

What are your prospects doing to find products like yours? Do you know what they are typing in that search box? If you are guessing as to what that is then you are costing your business unnecessary expense.

A well-researched keyword phrase will clearly show what the main purpose of the search is. So when you think you have found a keyword, ask yourself, “What problem is this person trying to solve? What are his issues?” If you are not able to answer those then what you have is too general so you have to research again otherwise you are going to lose money.

If you are just starting out you might want to try out Google Adwords because that is for free and it can help by providing you an amazing range of information that will help you zero in on inexpensive, targeted keywords that will bring in people with a problem that your product can solve.

Scatter gun Ads

Every advertisement that you think of should be based on one keyword phrase that is relevant to one specific problem. Using an advertisement that is too general might result to clicks that are not valid. What do I mean? Someone might click it but in reality, these people are actually looking something entirely different.

In writing your advertisements make sure that you do it right, spend some time on it. Write as if you are the one with problems that needs resolution. Use your keyword in the header and try to integrate it to the body of the advertisement. In the body of your advertisement, be sure to mention the product benefits instead of just mentioning the features.

Unrelated landing page

People click on your advertisement because they want to know if you can solve their problems, so if you link unrelated landing pages and prospects see it is a different thing then they will for sure close that window and never click on your advertisement ever again.

If your prospects click, on an advertisement, that sells handbags and then they are taken to a landing page with all sorts of other products, or they have to figure out how to navigate to get to the handbags section then chances are you have lost a sale.

Click-through cost money and conversions keep you in business

So be sure that you make the most out of each click you receive. The conversion of each click is what keeps your business going.

Continuous work

If your advertisement is not working, test other advertisements against it by modifying some elements and running them against each other. Think of your original ad the control ad, change the headline, and see if the new ads yield better results. Keep doing this until you get the results that you want.

Source: internethomebasedbusiness.startup-internetbusiness.com