Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Advertising

Key Points

• As the Internet is now the primary and largest medium for entertainment, information, and soon purchases, online promotion has become the most effective way to advertise businesses. However, while there seems to be no harm in using this method, knowing everything about it before trying is beneficial, especially for new companies or entrepreneurs. If you're looking to promote your new business, product, or blog online but aren't quite sure yet, this article can help.

• In the following sections, we'll discuss both the advantages and disadvantages of digital advertising; please read on.

One of the best benefits of digital advertising is having a broader reach. While TVs, newspapers, and radios are limited to promoting in a particular country or region, content on the Internet, on the other hand, can reach anyone in the world.

Whether it's a video promotion on YouTube or ad banners on apps and websites, a business' ads can quickly display on someone's digital screen anywhere. Since there are no current government regulations on ads in most countries, companies and professionals can easily put out their promotions without worrying about legalities or such requirements across continents.

If there are wishes that many advertisers in the past have, the ability to target ads to particular groups of people would likely be one of those. Thankfully, in the present, it's now possible to choose the gender, age, nationality, and location of individuals that will see a specific advertisement.

Using what are called cookies and social media profile data, advertising algorithms can decide whether an ad is appropriate or likely to click for a specific user based on likes or dislikes, stated gender and birthday, and detected location using GPS. Moreover, even though an ad will appear to someone who isn't interested, it will still primarily display on the screens of users with related activity on their browsers and social platforms. Accordingly, these things make promotions more effective and relevant.

Unlike conventional advertising, promoting on the Internet offers more flexibility in terms of fees. Instead of paying a one-time contract for a TV or radio airtime, a company can decide whether to pay per campaign, impression or click.

Currently, there are different ways to promote ads online, including video sponsorships, social media sponsored posts, ad banners on websites and apps, and more. Depending on the platform or service to use, businesses can choose whether to pay for a one-time deal, an entire campaign (including content, distribution, and output analysis), or per view or click. In effect, these choices can help businesses save money from useless promotions and only pay for surely or actually viewed ads.

Like the freedom of using the Internet, digital advertisers can choose how their ads would behave or look. As such, a company can decide everything regarding an advertisement without following strict or conservative guidelines from government agencies or TV and radio policies.

In detail, it's possible to customize an ad's appearance (images, colors, symbols), what words it will use, and how it will act after every view or click (either redirection to a link or refreshing to display another variation of the ad). Aside from that, there's no exclusivity of promotions to a single platform or other limiting terms. In other words, one can have the ultimate independence of advertising online, thanks to the open nature of the Internet.

Finally, the only advantage of digital advertising that any TV or radio channel and newspaper can't compete with is the ability to view the results and effects of ads on sales. Given that banners, short links, and social media platforms have different ways of tracking viewers, visitors, and engagements, learning whether an ad is effective or not helpful is possible.

In ad platforms like Google Ads, one can view real-time data of a promotion's performance and results in an easy-to-understand dashboard. Moreover, on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, users can view in-depth details on engagements and other insightful information. Lastly, with link trackers, it is possible to identify if a sale came from an ad click, referral, or other means. Accordingly, these possibilities help companies understand the market and their target audience better, adjust advertising efforts, and even offer new products/services based on ad analysis outcomes.

Since it's easy to start advertising digitally, many businesses now promote their goods and services online. As a result, anyone planning to advertise on the Internet will have to face tough competition. In detail, it's about standing out from the crowd of thousands of stores and companies offering the same products. Besides that, the challenge of competing to be on top of search results on search engines like Google is also a thing to overcome.

While most users know that ads help support their favorite apps, websites, or content creators, they still find promotions distracting and disturbing to the viewing experience. In effect, most people ignore or do anything they can to eliminate these distractions, making ad efforts ineffective. To explain, these results from bad planning and implementation of promotions where ads become too invasive to content, hogs data plan too much or are irrelevant to the viewers.

Yes, anyone can advertise online; however, making impactful promotions requires skills and training. Aside from creating graphics or images for ads if using existing resources is not preferred, it's also necessary to know the best tools and how to use them effectively. Also, with ad platforms, the ability to understand and make use of raw data, engagement patterns, and more statistics is vital. Moreover, when improving brand discoverability, one should either learn or hire someone to do SEO and other ad-related tasks, so the world will know that the business or website exists in the first place.

While many websites now implement techs to prevent users from viewing their content with ad blockers, most still don't and rely only on visitors' choices. Accordingly, this turns ads invisible to people and makes the results data inaccurate. Since an ad is technically in the display even though it's obscured, the ad platform will count it towards the impression data and even charge the advertiser for it.

In advertising, the clarity and proper placement of words, images, and layouts in ads are essential to attract visitors. However, due to the different variations in screen sizes and internet connection strengths, promotional content might display incorrectly. In phones, ads might appear distorted or incomplete, resulting in unclear messages. Apart from that, for people with slow internet connections, banners might load in poor resolutions, render slower, or not even show at all.

Revisit a section

• Advantages of Digital Advertising
• Reach a global audience
• Target specific market
• Save on costs
• Freedom to advertise
• View results and engagements

• Disadvantages of Digital Advertising
• More competition
• Distracting on content and websites
• Requires specific skills and processes
• Ad blockers obstruct ads
• Preview difficulties



• Advertise on the Internet Wisely