Web 2.0 has affected a sea change in the interactive marketing space because now information flow has become multi-directional ? from machine to human, peer to peer, and even machine to peer and vice versa. This is miles ahead of the one way flow prevalent during early days of Internet. Web 2.0 phenomenons such as blogs, RSS, social media, etc., have made Internet a medium for creating, distributing, using and sharing content.

This avatar of web is mixing and mashing earlier stand alone silos of website content, advertising, email, search engine optimization and corporate and product blogging into one vast interactive space where lectures are becoming a conversation. And it is important for a smart and up with the times web advertising agency to play just the right music to keep the audience interested.

This right music is concerned with gaining and maintaining a favorable attitude of the target customers towards the Websites. In interactive space, it is a website's interactivity which determines the revisits and conversions of the visitors.

It is interactivity which sets apart traditional and Internet advertising. And any aspiring interactive advertising agency must take note that it is because of interactivity that consumers and advertisers are capable of real-time, two-way and fast interactions resulting in increased traffic and conversions.

But in these times of consumer centric marketing, don't consumers have a say in deciding a website's interactivity?

In fact they have the biggest say!

It was found that it is not the website's degree of interactivity per se, but perceived interactivity on part of visitors, which determines the overall attitude toward Website and a positive or negative decision.

It is perceived interactivity which determines the level of various interactions - between consumers and advertisers, the influence of messages on consumers, and sharing among consumers themselves.

Let's discuss this perceived interactivity and its effect on attitude of consumers towards a particular website for the benefit of myriad web advertising agencies.

Interactivity on the web can be of three types:

(1) Interaction between users and messages/machine ? this is interaction between human and non-human entity. This type of interaction is mostly behavioral or psychological on part of humans.

(2) Interaction between senders and receivers ? here senders and receivers interact through computers.

(3) Interaction between machine and machine in the semantic web space of future

While these are the types of interaction a web master would strive to promote, he/she should not lose sight of perceived interactivity which would determine the visitor's perception of control on their actions in the computer-mediated environment and the perception of their capability of navigating through cyberspace.

This perceived interactivity has two constructs:

Ease of navigability ? the ease with which a visitor roam around the virtual cognitive space and glean knowledge out of the data making up that space.

Responsiveness - how responsive is the web space toward the visitor's actions? This space may comprise a machine, messages, and an imagined receiver.

Since perceived interactivity is the combination of internal factors such as perceived control over where the Internet user is and where he/she is going, and external factors such as his or her sense of how responsive the Web as a system is to his or her actions; following affect the perceived interactivity:

Speed of Interaction: Faster the perceived speed of action in web environment, higher would be the perception of interactivity.

Range: Higher the number of options in making changes in the web environment, higher would be the perception of interactivity.

Mapping: This concerns the user controlling where he/she is going. Higher the sense of navigation, better the perceived interactivity.

Since perceived interactivity is positively related to consumers? attitude towards a web site; designing, web advertising and marketing should be tackled with responsiveness and navigability in mind and by factoring in consumers? needs and requirements, perceived interactivity can be manipulated to web advertising agencies? advantage.