therefore. Among the experiments being carried out is one that attempts to understand the type of advertisements that consumers' minds tend to register most easily, by scanning the brains of volunteers, while they are shown different advertisements online. Others include attempts to compile user data, based upon different parameters related to demographics.Online customer behavior is expected to be mapped in far greater detail than ever before, on the basis of these. As to which of these are likely to be the most appropriate ones, remains to be seen. Some analysts expect there to be some sort of stratification, on account of such developments, when these fructify.They also expect that towards the top end, there would be websites that can get their customers to share information that could prove useful for the marketing effort, besides attracting and retaining a sizeable number, through an effective promotion strategy, quality and the ability to build up a high level of trust.Premium rates could be expected to be charged by such websites, for services related to advertising, whereas those that fall in the lower strata are likely to provide such services at rates that would be far more economical.Formats:As against banner advertising, advertising related to search has been undergoing growth at a much faster rate, in the recent past, with Google and Yahoo being the leading search engines. Companies advertise against keywords and their advertisements are displayed along with the search-results, when a user searches for those words, on that particular search engine. The payments for these are generally made on the basis of the number of times the advertisements are clicked.The trend could very well be reversed though, with videos and display banners growing fast, in the near future. In line with these expectations, packaged goods, movies and car advertisers, among other leading advertisers, have been allocating more funds for spending more on such advertisements, in the coming days.This is, once again, likely to drive home the need for more reliable metrics, besides the important ones already in use, like the number of page views and clicks. As mentioned before, these two have not been found to be as reliable as these were earlier believed to be.Another challenge is to get the companies with substantial advertising budgets, which spend less than 10