Advertising on the Internet is quickly becoming the best way to attract potential clients to your business. Having a solid web-presence has never been more important as the internet has become the default resource for billions of people to find pretty much whatever they want to find, and this is becoming the case for more and more people.

It is for this reason that Internet advertising is so vital if you want your business to thrive amongst the competition in years to come as the more traditional advertising methods that we have grown used to in the last 20 years or so diminish.

The three most commonly used methods of online advertising are Cost Per Click (or pay-per-click), Cost Per Action (or Cost Per Acquisition) and Cost Per Impression.

Pay per click / cost per click: With this system, the advertiser is charged a set amount whenever their advert is clicked on. They do not pay to have the advert itself placed, only when the advert is clicked on does the advertiser get have to pay anything. This method is widely used because it allows you to carry out accurate market research by analysing each click.

Cost Per Action / Acquisition: This method of Internet advertising is based on performance and is popular among the affiliate marketing businesses. With this method, the person placing the ad takes all the risk in doing so, and the advertiser pays only for the users who get converted, i.e. that carry out a transaction on their site.

Cost Per Impression (CPM): The third method of online advertising that is used above most others is cost per impression or CPM (the M represents the roman numeral for 1000) allows the advertiser to pay for their ad to be presented to a specific audience. CPM prices are charged per thousand impressions. However, not all impressions will be counted. Those that occur because of page reloading or internal user activity will not be counted.

Apart from the obvious benefit of having access to a much larger target audience than you would with traditional methods, probably the biggest advantage of online advertising is that once the agreement has been made, the advert can immediately be placed, and edited instantly should customer requirements change.

Related Articles