by: Tanner Larsson
Hover ads have been touted as the replacement and successor of those irritating and annoying pop up ads and it seems that the world have mixed feelings about this new advertising method. According to a popular Internet Marketing Dictionary, Hover advertising is a new method of displaying a message in a webpage. With the painful death of pop up ads, along comes the next generation of Internet advertising, the Hover ads.
What is a hover ad and what do they do?
The great big news is this – pop up killers that has been on a killing rampage since middle of 2004 or earlier cannot kill hover ads. You see, a pop up ad is a new web page that pops up whenever any page with popup codes embedded in them. Compare this to a hover ad. The hover ad is a kind of ad that hovers within the HTML page itself, so, the popup killer applications can’t get to them unless they kill the whole webpage….which isn’t exactly what the advertisers and media is looking for.
Pop up ads mainly use Javascript to load new popup windows while hover ads use DHTML (something like HTML – DHTML stands for Dynamic HTML).
Have you ever seen ads that sort of like floats around in a webpage and it won’t go away until you click on the little ‘x’ at the side of the advertisement to close the window? Those are hover ads. They just….well, hover within the webpage.
How does the hover ad work and why does it work?
Generally speaking, with hover ad codes embedded into a webpage, it does slow down the downloading of the page a little but let’s take www.auction-essentials.com as an example. Even if the downloading of the webpage is slowed down a little, an interested reader won’t mind the unobtrusive ad. Imaginative and creative minds have even put a new twist to hover ads. They can make the hover ads a little transparent too, so, even if the hover ad is on top of a portion of the page (or text), they won’t miss a thing because the ad is sort of transparent. Brilliant, won’t you agree?
How effective are hover ads in bringing traffic?
Not surprisingly, since hover ads are less irritating than popup ads, hover ads are more effective for branding, newsletter signups, announcements, advertising, and promotional campaigns. Because hover ads are not like flash ads that run away every time you try to close the ad, they are more ‘tolerable’ making exposure rates higher and more effective.
As one user and advertiser said, “If commercials on TV irritate you, does it make you stop watching TV altogether?” The answer is a resounding NO. Internet marketers are flocking to this new technology and using hover ads as a way of getting their most important messages in front of their website visitors without annoying or irritating them.
Copyright © Tanner Larsson