PPG Industries last spring sent thousands of e-mails promoting environmentally friendly flat glass products to architects registered to the McGraw-Hill's Architectural Record site. When six times the expected number responded by following the Web links to learn more, PPG was sold on the value of using the Internet to woo customers.

		Graphic: Media Growth, 2004-2005

Internet advertising -- an unproven yet promising venue for years -- appears to be winning over a growing number of companies. For example, search engine Google Inc. reported this month that it collected $1.032 billion in revenues during just the last three months of 2004 -- a 101 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

Web advertising is projected to grow 11.2 percent this year, the most of any category and more than double the expected 5.1 percent ncrease overall, according to marketing research firm TNS Media ntelligence. TNS is forecasting ad spending to reach $150.5 billion in 2005, continuing a recovery from the painful recessionary slump.

Robert Struble, PPG's marketing communications manager, said the Pittsburgh-based paints, glass and chemicals manufacturer plans to spend four times more on online ads than it did last year, using a combination of new Web sites, search engine links and other online tools.

While he won't disclose the amount of his online budget, Struble said he does not plan to shift money away from traditional media outlets that already have proved effective. Instead, money for the new online ventures has been carved from elsewhere in his budget.

While his agency, the Pipitone Group in the city's Perry North section, has seen a number of clients simply reclassify dollars once considered part of the technology budget, other agencies are seeing companies reassess their overall ad spending. Media budgets that used to allocate 2 percent or 3 percent to online may now devote 10 percent to 15 percent to such initiatives, said David Heidenreich, director of client services for Ripple Effects Interactive in Oakland.

In some ways, the shift reflects the fact the online world is growing up.

Internet staff at many ad agencies got into the business in the late 1990s to build Web pages, often for companies that had never had them before. The Internet's explosive growth meant a lot of people believed that they needed to be online, but they could not always tell just what they were getting in return for their investment.

Newspaper publishers and magazines hurried onto the Web, but unsure of who was using their sites, may have given someone who advertised in the traditional venue a free banner spot on the Web site. "I think before, they were giving it away," said Arnie Begler, Pipitone's vice president of strategic planning.

The past year or so has seen a convergence of an improving economy, an influx of tracking tools that let advertisers see more detail about what they are getting online and a better understanding by Web publishers and search providers, such as Yahoo! and Google, of how to sell their services. These days, media kits handed out by newspapers and trade publications all include statistics on their online traffic, something that might not have even existed a few years ago.

"They finally figured out how to price, how to put packages together that deliver value to advertisers," said Struble. For example, he might sponsor a combination of key word searches to direct someone looking for certain building types on the Architectural Record (www.archrecord.com) to information from PPG.

As online technology and tracking tools have improved, so has the ability for providers to set prices, said Heidenreich. Someone targeting backpackers, for example, may pay $25 per thousand impressions on an outdoor magazine's Web site but just $7 or $8 per thousand on a more broadly used site such as Yahoo! Impressions refer to the times that a potential customer sees the ad.

Just as ads during the Super Bowl cost more than ads during the regular football season, increased demand for prime banner spots on prominent sites is sending the prices for those locations way up, said Rick Gardinier, senior vice president and managing director of Downtown ad agency Blattner Brunner's interactive arm, bbdigital.

That has put pressure on the creative staff to make the online work stand out. The historic creative vs. tech-driven silos are disappearing, as are the static bars across the top of Web pages. While bbdigital's revenues grew 45 percent last year compared with the agency's 35 percent overall increase to $15 million, Gardinier said fewer projects involve only online work.

Online departments have still found themselves adding personnel to keep up with the growth.

These include specialists who understand how consumers use search tools and can help a company hone its pitch, and regular staff that can sift through the Internet ad blizzard to figure out where to buy online positions. Ripple Effects, which laid off several staffers a couple of years ago, is now back to its pre-layoff levels of 45 people.

Begler, at Pipitone, said many clients still were not using the Internet enough. That may be because they do not yet grasp the possibilities. Or it may be that their audience is not one that has moved many of its activities online.

Besides architects, PPG sells glass to automotive mechanics who may spend their days working on cars and then go home where they do not want to turn on a computer and check e-mail. An electronic broadcast message would never reach enough of them to be effective.

Just because online tools can be cheap and easy to track, they don't work for everyone, Begler said. "A big challenge in marketing today is not to fall into Internet Nirvana."