The art of online advertising has come a long way in the last 20 years. Beginning in the 1990s, online marketers have attempted to gain click-throughs and customers as a way of supporting their business. The techniques used by online marketers have by necessity developed a great deal since the 1990s, as the Internet user’s needs and interests have changed.
Today, thanks to technologies like beacon targeting, it is far easier to build a profile of a certain consumer and follow them throughout their browsing experience, from their emails to social media. Some people find this intrusive and annoying, but the vast majority of Internet users have grown accustomed to it and even find it useful in their daily browsing needs.
When Darren Ewert and Mike Dreher founded their own company in 2015 under the branding Darren and Mike, these advances were some of the most important tools to their success. A business who can successfully adapt and leverage the cutting edge of marketing technology is a company that will thrive.
This article will explore the background and history of online advertising, beginning in the 1990s and continuing through to today.
Beginnings
In October 1994, the world of online advertising was born. HotWired, an offshoot of Wired magazine, published the first banner ad. The first iteration of the online advertising model began with the use of banner ads, which were published on a website for a certain amount of time. The advertisers were charged an upfront cost which was then funneled into the business.
In the infancy of digital marketing, ad click-through rates were much higher than they are today. The first online ads on HotWired and other websites enjoyed the recently unheard-of click-through rate of 40 percent. Today, in comparison, click-through rates are closer to 0.06 percent.
Targeting Banner Ads
Banner ads were at first completely untargeted. The same ad was shown to all visitors to a website. WebConnect, one of the first digital advertising agencies, began offering its customers a way to target advertising to their most desired demographics. For example, women may be shown a makeup ad, while men may be served an ad for men’s running shoes. Compared to today’s granular targeting, the system was crude, but it represented a watershed moment in online advertising.
This enabled ad buyers to save their money for the most important demographics rather than blasting their ads to the entire Internet-using public. This also enabled ad agencies and websites to follow their targeted customers throughout their use of the Internet.
Digital marketers also devised a way to count the number of times a particular user saw a banner ad, switching the banner for a different one after the target number was reached. This prevented digital fatigue. Cookies, or unique digital identifiers, were the way in which these ad exposures were counted.
ROI Tracking
In 1996, Doubleclick pioneered a service called D.A.R.T., enabling companies to find out how many times an ad was clicked and viewed across many websites. Advertisers were then given the power to see how an ad was performing and make changes to a campaign while it was still in progress.
Pop-Up Ads
In 1997, the pop-up ad was invented. These were the scourge of the online advertising industry as far as users were concerned. Pop-ups were created as a way of separating the ad from the website which hosted it. The original creator’s intentions were good, but the way in which their invention was used caused a major shift in the online advertising landscape.
By the early 2000s, most browsers came with pop-up blockers, effectively rendering that form of advertising useless. Pop-ups are still used in a limited capacity today and many businesses invest in pop ads to increase exposure.
Pay-Per-Click and Paid Search
Paid search engine placement was created in 1999 on the website GoTo. The service enabled ad buyers to place their results at the top of search engine pages. There was some backlash when the concept was first used online. Many people were worried that paid searches would lead to corrupt search engine results.
Pay-for-placement evolved into pay-per-click. This created revenue when an end user clicked on a search result. PPC has become a fundamental tool for agencies like Darren and Mike, and is now one of the most viable tools available to help businesses grow their market share.
Google AdWords
In 2000, the fledgling search engine Google pioneered a new advertising service called AdWords. This generated search revenue without lessening the quality of the search results. In these early days of search engine targeting, the density of keywords was the main driver of click-throughs. Search engine optimization or SEO was in its infancy.
Google also introduced a system called the Quality Score, which ranked websites according to their credibility and usefulness. Pages with a higher quality score would rank above others using the same keywords. This system is still in use today.
Advances in Ad Targeting
In the mid-2000s, the ad landscape we see today was beginning to be developed. As young users began using Facebook more often than traditional web browsers, advertisers saw an opportunity to place their ads with incredible targeted accuracy. Though Facebook resisted ads at first, they soon came to see the economic benefit. Facebook is one of the pioneers of highly targeted advertising. As targeted advertising became more popular, the overall volume of ads served to each user became lower. These blasts of non-targeted ads were replaced by ads matching their demographic data.
Beacon Targeting
Beacon targeting has revolutionized online advertising. Through the use of a beacon, a type of cookie, advertising is able to follow the user throughout their online experience. If someone mentions a type of product in their email, a beacon will pick this up and transmit the information to online advertisers and social media. While this practice has been decried as a privacy violation, it has caused ads to become more useful — a potentially winning tradeoff for some users.
The Evolution of Digital Advertising
Beginning in the 1990s, the history of digital advertising has gone through many exciting changes. As we move into the new decade of the 2020s, ads will become even more targeted and seamless for the end-user. Learning the history of digital advertising can help advertisers and web developers understand the landscape as it stands today.
