Overview

Compared to a number of neighbour countries, Belgian Internet penetration is rather low. According to ISPA, Belgium counted approximately 4.1 million of Internet connections at the beginning of 2016, of which almost 3.7 million are residential connections. Almost all connections are broadband connections and this makes Belgium one of the leaders in Europe.

Internet takes a minimal share of ad spend; around 5% of the total ad spend. In 2016, 10 Internet sales houses with in total 214 sites were measured by Nielsen, a rather limited number compared to the total amount of sales houses and sites commercialized in Belgium. According to Nielsen, most ad spend was allocated to hln, nieuwsblad and sudpresse in 2016.

Search engine marketing has been expanding within online marketing. Nevertheless it is not measured by Nielsen just as Real Time Bidding.

Advantages of Internet:

• international market
• fast, adaptable and flexible
• very extensive creative possibilities
• one-to-one, interactivity
• tactical (experiment, tests, online follow-up, ROI, …)
• modern and future-oriented

 Disadvantages of Internet:

• limited coverage
• very technical, jargon
• complex, low level of standardisation and uniformity
• difficult to measure

Display ads are still the most common ads, but we can observe a trend in an increasing use of integration and advertorials.

More and more sites are commercialized by sales houses which not only have Internet in their portfolio, but also other media; they offer sites separately or in cross-media packages.

Rates vary from sales house to sales house; from daily rates to rates by number of “impressions”, etc.