Skip to main content

The Evolution of Digital Marketing

The Evolution of Digital Marketing - Sachs Marketing Group

As we head into a new decade, it’s a great time to look back at 25 years of digital advertising history. Regardless of how good a product or service is, to attract potential customers, you must advertise. Since the early 1990s, digital advertising has changed the concept of marketing for several businesses. We’ve all seen the era of billboards, flyers, and posters used to advertise products. Now, we see digital Billboards that change advertisements had every few seconds in densely populated areas, but we see much less of the “old school” methods like flyers on posts all over town.

Have you ever taken the time to think about why it has changed over the years? One of the main contributing factors to that evolution is the result of analytical technologies. As technology continues to innovate, we’ve seen digital advertising morph alongside it, and we don’t expect it to stop evolving any time soon. From the flashy banner ads of the early 90s to the artificial intelligence-powered bidding optimization we see today, digital advertising has made quite the journey to deliver the right content to the right potential customer at the right time to convert them to a customer when they discover a need.

Adobe recently researched all the milestones in digital advertising over the past 25 years, which I’ve listed here.

1994 – Banner Ads Galore

Hotwired – part of Wired Magazine started using banner ads in 1994. The click-through rates of ads at the time was a whopping 44%. Today, according to Smart Insights, the overall display ad click-through rate is just 0.05%.

1995 – Yahoo Launches

Yahoo launched and became the primary search engine online. That same year, HTTP cookies were introduced as a way to track user behavior and activity online.

1996 – Flash Makes Its Debut

Flash 1.0 debuted to internet users and became a robust way to advertise on the web. Content marketing was introduced through the American Society for Newspaper Editors. Google Chrome is ending its support for Flash at the end of 2020.

1997 – Hello, Pop-up Ads!

These were developed to gain user attention and get potential customers interested in the products and services they offered.

1998 – Google is Born

Though the company had already been formed, this year, they introduced the Google Search Engine. Advertising networks created their own way and connected to various websites with advertising.

1999 – PPC is Introduced

PPC advertising is highly competitive now, but the pay for placement concept wasn’t Google’s brainchild. GoTo.com introduced it.

2000 – Google Launches AdWords

In 2000, Google introduced its AdWords product. It was designed to help they pay per click advertising method become easier. That same year, mobile advertising was also introduced.

2001 – The Dot Com Bubble Bursts

The.com bubble, which expanded from the mid-1990s to 2000, busts. It cost investors 5 trillion dollars.

2002 – The Dawn of Adblockers

The first ad blocker was launched as a browser extension this year. This was designed to stop the pop-up ads that were deemed annoying by users.

2003 – LinkedIn is Born

The social media platform specifically for professionals launched this year.

2004 – Facebook Launches

The largest social media platform till now launched this year. Its first advertisement was known as Facebook Flyers.

2005 – YouTube Launches

In addition to the YouTube video website launching, we saw the launch of broadband connections to provide better performance and faster connectivity.

2006 – Digital Ads

The use of hyper-targeted digital ads started this year. Google buys YouTube.

2007 – iPhone Launches

This was a significant milestone in the mobile industry.

2008 – Digital Agency becomes a Term

Beyond coining the term digital agency, the App Store for iPhone users was also launched

2009 – Instant

Google releases Instant to support real-time search.

2010 – iPad Launches

Apple adds the tablet to its product offering this year.

2011 – Snapchat

Snapchat, the social network that uses videos with augmented reality features launches this year.

2013 – Real-Time Marketing

Instagram launches a new feature with promoted posts that enable users to run ads while promoting previous posts on Instagram.

2014 – The Dawn of In-App Advertising

As a result of the surge in smartphones, the focus of advertising changed from mobile advertising to in-app advertising. This year, Amazon launched its first speech recognition technology as well.

2015 – Mobile Traffic Overtakes Computer Web Traffic

At this point, the internet gets more traffic from mobile devices than desktop devices. For the first time in history, the usage of video content is also increased.

2016 – Pokemon Go

The new app had more than 45 million users globally. It changed the concept of augmented reality.

2017 – Ads.txt

This year the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced Ads.txt. Project intended to increase transparency in the programmatic advertising ecosystem. It stands for authorized digital sellers. It offers a simple, flexible, and secure method that publishers and distributors can use to publicly list the companies they authorized to sell their digital inventory.

The file can only be posted to a domain by a publisher’s webmaster to make it valid and authentic. Because it is a text file, it is easy to update. It supports multiple types of supplier relationships, including domain owners who sell on exchanges through their own accounts, networks and sales houses who programmatically sell on behalf of domain owners, and content syndication partnerships where multiple authorized sellers represent the same inventory.

The amount of revenue digital agencies generated almost doubled since 2009, and Google drops Instant search.

2018 – Voice Technology

Enter the dawn of digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google.

2019 – Personalized Advertising

Because of the use of the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), companies can now deliver more relevant content and personalized advertising.

Though we already know one thing about 2020, what else do you think we can expect to see in the coming years? Over the next decade? Beyond? Share your predictions with me in the comments below. I’d love to hear what they are!

 

The post The Evolution of Digital Marketing appeared first on Sachs Marketing Group.



from Blog – Sachs Marketing Group https://ift.tt/34lW0z0
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is a Local Citation? Local SEO

In simple SEO terms, a local citation refers to any mention of your company online. This could be in a business directory, or on an industry-specific site, a blog or any other local website. Although local citations can help you rank in local search results, they are no longer a major ranking factor . However, they are still worth considering in order to promote your business. Common citations you are likely to already know of include listings on business directory websites such as Yell or Thomson Local . A complete citation should include the name, address and phone number of your business. Local citations do not always include a link to your site although they are more valuable if they do. What do they do? Citations help rank your Google Local Pack listing (this was formerly called Google+ Local map) by providing Google with credible sources of information about your business. Citations tell Google that your business exists, is legitimate and that what you say about it is accur...

The beginner’s guide to semantic search: Examples and tools

Ever since Google’s Hummingbird, the term “semantic search” has been thrown around a lot. Yet, the concept is often misunderstood. What is semantic search and how it helps SEO efforts? When people speak to each other, they understand more than just words. They understand the context, non-verbal cues  (facial expressions, nuances of the voice, etc.) and so much more. It comes naturally, so we don’t really appreciate how difficult it is to explain what is being communicated without the help of all “beyond-words” signals. Factors that make the lives of both Google and SEO so difficult Google is trying (and often struggling) to understand what it is that their users want (without actually seeing or hearing them) SEOs are trying to reverse-engineer what it is that Google managed to understand from their users’ queries and how to build pages that meet those mysterious criteria. As Google’s algorithm is getting more mature, it is becoming even more difficult to decode what...

7 Boring SEO Tasks You Can Automate to Save One Day Per Week

An SEO expert’s day is filled with a plentitude of activities to rank well on Google , starting with taking care of basic content quality to backlinks, site structure, mobile user experience, and other technical features. Not to mention having to squeeze the time spent on each task between meetings, conference calls, emails, and urgent projects, which take up a large portion of the week. Before you can even think about finishing less-important SEO tasks, you are already running out of time. The truth is some tasks are too boring to complete at the end of a tiring day. But you can’t leave it on the table to handle some other day, as it will only overshadow other, more important tasks. So, what’s the way out? The good news is advanced online tools can handle your boring SEO tasks, helping you save at least one day per week for creative activities. Here are some of the boring SEO tasks you can automate now and save yourself from performing these tedious activities. 1. Automate SE...