Internet is the most common source used for various business applications these days. In India too, there has been an increase in Internet penetration annually. Most of the claimed internet users (who have ever used internet) are getting converted to active internet users (who access internet at least once in a month). Also, people have become interested to purchase products or services through Internet. So most of the organizations realized the importance of the Internet and started spending on online advertisements. There also has been an increase in the number of Internet users visiting the online ads.
The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) provided a report on online advertising in 2010. It stated that the sponsored links in search engines had higher conversion ratio from seen to click. It means that most of the visitors who had seen sponsored links were willing to click on the link for information about the advertisement. It was found that 74% of the Internet users had seen the search engine ads and 51% of them clicked for knowing about it. The click to seen ratio was found to be higher for sponsored links in search engines (69%) and was followed by streaming videos (60%). About 24% of the Internet users had seen the streaming videos and 9% of them clicked. The click to seen ration for other online advertisements were found to be 50% for email ads and sponsored links in other websites, 53% for flash animations or videos, 54% for banner ads, 37% for pop-ups and 26% for viral marketing ads.
It is known that visitors do not prefer unwanted intrusion and hence the pop-up ads had a very low click to seen conversion ratio. It can therefore be said that as the ads are relevant to the other contents on the web page, sponsored links in search engines had the highest demand in online advertising views.
As online ads are found to be intrusive and distracting, many of them are clicked only when they are found informative and interesting. It is therefore necessary to decide the right placement of the ad to help users in finding the right products and services.