DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ONLINE ADVERTISEMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

1.1 Introduction

Advertisement is a form of promotional activity that is used to encourage an audience (viewers, readers, or listeners) to continue or take some new action. The desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering. To reach an audience, these promotions must be published. The process of making information available to the general public is called publishing. An advertiser is essentially the one who creates a product or offers services and wants to publicize the product or services with the help of popular platforms like websites, press, and radio owned by publishers. Publishers either own or manage platforms, like television channels, radio stations, and websites, which are available to the general public. With the Internet becoming a powerful medium for reaching people, it has become popular among advertisers and publishers. Promoting a product or a service on the Internet is called online advertising, and publishing that information on websites, forums, and blogs is called online publishing.

As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.

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1.2 Background of Study

Online advertising spending has been increasing at an unprecedented pace over the past decade. Advertising on the Internet differs from advertising in traditional outlets such as television and print in various ways. First, web ads are more relevant to consumers compared to traditional ads. Traditional ads published on television or in print media are made available to all irrespective of whether one wants the information or not. On the other hand, web ads are displayed to users on the basis of their past online behavior and interests, making the ads more relevant to consumers. Advertisers can target a particular group of customers based on their location, gender, age, and language.

An ad server can be a local ad server or a remote ad server. Local ad servers are bound to the domains of one publisher, whereas remote ad servers can serve ads to multiple publishers with multiple domains at a time. Remote ad servers deliver ads from one central source, thereby making it possible for advertisers and publishers to track the distribution of their online advertisements and have one single location for controlling the rotation and distribution of their advertisements across the web. An ad server manages all desktop, tablet, and mobile ads from a single, integrated ad server.

The an Online Advertisement Management System (AMS) application created in this thesis provides a common platform to do online advertising and publishing through Google AdWords and AdSense, respectively, thereby helping businesses that are both advertisers and publishers. The AMS application aims to utilize the market of online advertising and publishing by providing an easy-to-use platform for ad serving. This system will benefit large and small businesses in advertising their products or services and generate revenue by publishing ads on their web pages.

Online advertising is giving tough competition to other types of advertising media. Newspapers and magazines all over the world are facing a great challenge in the form of lost ad revenue. The Internet is not only taking a share of the advertising, but a share of the audience as well. Online ads can look like television commercials or print ads. With cost per click (CPC) advertising, the advertiser only pays if a user clicks on the advert. This type of strategy can make advertising very cost effective, especially for those who do not have large advertising budgets. Marketers need to find what their major target market is. They also need to understand the timing of the advert.

The Internet becoming a powerful medium for reaching people, it has become popular among advertisers and publishers. Promoting a product or a service on the Internet is called online advertising, and publishing that information on websites, forums, and blogs is called online publishing. As more people turn to the Internet as a source for socialization, communication, and daily news, more advertising is done to reach a larger audience.

With traditional advertising, an advertiser can place ads on TV shows, radio programs, and magazines, but with web ads, there is no limit to how finely an advertiser can target the audience. Due to the rise in popularity of social media, Facebook and MySpace have become hot spots for advertising. An advertiser can target these platforms using almost any criteria. Advertising companies, such as Google, which targets ads based on users’ search history, have been taking into account users’ information needs related to their interests for targeted advertising. An effective interpretation of users’ information needs is necessary for targeted advertising. However, problems with the accumulated data that describe users’ information needs are huge volume, high dimensionality, and continuous change.

Web ads can be presented in various formats, such as text, graphics, sound, video, or their combinations. These formats may attract users’ attention much easier due to heir sensory effects. So web ads, such as animation plus sound, may increase the opportunity for consumers to process the ads. For example, when users are reading news on the Internet, an animated banner with flashing text may easily attract their attention. However, in the web medium, consumers are highly active and selective. Whether a type of advertising is acceptable or not depends on the consumer’s perception of whether the ad could fulfill his or her goals. The different formats of traditional advertising are: billboards, television commercials, radio ads, and posters. On the other hand, various online advertising formats are: banner ads, pop-up and pop-under ads, floating ads, streaming sidebar ads, pull down banner ads, and text ads.

Traditional media ads, especially television and radio commercials, often forcefully interrupt consumers’ attention from the media context. Fourth, web advertising enjoys the benefit of a larger audience as the Internet has become a very popular medium for gaining knowledge, whereas, in the case of traditional advertising, the audience is limited to the users of that particular medium of advertising (e.g., advertisements published in a newspaper of a particular language are limited to the people who read that newspaper). Web ads are not limited to any geographical location or time as the content gets published immediately, which is not possible in the case of traditional advertising. With online advertising, a small manufacturer in one part of the world can find customers in the other part. Online advertising has broken all geographical barriers that existed with other mediums.

The final benefit of online advertising over traditional advertising is the fact that tracking ads has become very easy with Internet advertising compared to traditional advertising. With online advertising, each and every advertising campaign is tracked by the ad server, saving a lot of time and money. Ad servers monitor all of the visitors who come to an advertiser’s website through the advertising campaigns and track any actions they take or orders they make. Ad servers also keep track of the budget, clicks, impressions, the conversion rate, and other statistics. This further helps with budget optimization, business decisions, and managing advertising campaigns. With traditional mediums of advertising, an advertiser cannot say for sure whether the customer who is watching or reading the advertisement is actually going to buy the product.

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1.3 Statement of Problem

Investigation revealed that advertising as a business promotional tool has been badly neglected in Nigerian industries as most managers think their products can survive without it. Even the few companies that advertise do not see reasons to study how the audience perceives their products, their acceptance or rejection and the reason for such attitude.

One of the major problems Business advertising face in their campaigns is still the use of primitive promotions channels such as press, brochure, catalogue, TV, cell phone, etc, and several offline channels which lacks a comprehensive, harmonizing advertisement framework. In this project work, we present a new solution for businesses to promote their business online to reach a wider audience.

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1.4 Aim and Objectives of the Study

The aim of the study is to design and implement an Online Advertisement Management System. In achieving this aim, the following specific objectives were laid out as follows to develop an application software that will:

1. Create a platform for businesses to reach a wider audience and increase sales and profits.
2. Display an online virtual store on the Internet where customers can browse the catalog and select products of interest.
3. Target ads for different users or content and display ads on the basis of users’ previous behavior.
4. Track advert impressions, clicks, revenue, conversions and report ad statistics in real time.
5. Provide a general purpose store where consumers can find products and services from the comfort of home through the Internet.

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1.5 Significance of Study

This research would be of benefit to business organizations. It would enable them to know how consumers feel about their products and also to create awareness of the role of advertising in developing perfect brand image. The research would also be useful to the government, advertising agencies, consumers and advertiser in all ramifications.

This study will be of immense benefit to marketer, advertiser and other researchers who intend to know more on this study and can also be used by non-researchers to build more on their research work. This study contributes to knowledge and could serve as a guide for other study.

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1.6 Scope of Study

The scope of the research is focused on the Design and Implementation of an Online Advertisement Management System.

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1.7 Limitations of the Study

During the course of this study, many things militated against its completion, some of which are:

1. Time Constraint: The time frame given to accomplish this project was very short due to school academic calendar and it was carried out under pressure which made the researcher not to implement some necessary features.
2. Establishment Policies: Establishment policies posed a serious limitation as most staffs are not ready to release information needed for this project work. There were lots of information needed from the staffs of this institution to enhance the study which took them time to release or they did not release at all for security purposes, hence the scope was reduced.
3. Research material: availability of research material is a major setback to the scope of the study.
4. Frequent power failure: This made the researcher append more money on fuel to ensure sustainable power.
5. Financial Constraint: Insufficient fund tends to impede the efficiency of the researcher in sourcing for the relevant materials, literature or information and in the process of data collection (internet).

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1.8 Definition of Terms

Advertising: advertising is any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods and services through mass media such as newspapers, magazines, television or radio by an identified sponsor.