A Buyers Guide to Banner Advertising - Part 1
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Anyone who has spent an amount of time on the Web will have realised that one of the most actively present elements to be found on most websites that you visit is advertising. One of the most popular, and certainly the first form of online advertising is the banner ad. These small ads usually come in various rectangular forms, appear on many kinds of websites with various different subject matter, yet they all share the same basic purpose: The banner ad serves as a link directly to the advertisers website, so that when you click on it, your browser will instantly redirect you there.
Banner ads are usually relatively simple pieces of HTML code, but their presence on the web and their importance in Internet-based business is immense. The first clickable web ad was sold by a company called GNN in 1993. Since then just about every business with an online presence has made use of banner advertising. Advertising is one of the main sources of revenue on the Web, not only for businesses aiming to generate revenue through advertising their products online, but also for websites which permit other businesses to publish ads on their sites for a fee.
The primary objective of a banner ad is to generate a click-through, in other words, someone who is browsing the publisher’s website will click on the banner and be taken to the advertiser’s site. In an optimal situation the visitor will then proceed to make a purchase of the advertiser’s product. Failing the click-through, the second objective of banner ads is what is known as branding. In this case the advertiser hopes to effectively communicate the content of the ad in a way that the visitor will make a conscious note for future reference. Branding works on the principle that when you are faced with a choice of products, you are more likely to choose the one you are most familiar with all be it only through advertising.
The popularity of banner ads is partially due to the fact that they are so simple to produce and publish. Basic, static banners can be whipped up in a matter of hours, yet to create a truly effective rich media advertisement with elaborate animation and user interactivity, professional and extensive programming is required. Good advertising agencies and professional designers not only bring their programming skills to banner ad creation, but also their creativity and extensive marketing experience. Banner ads vary considerably in quality because their creators vary a great deal in ability and experience. The range is even greater with banner ads than with most other forms, however, because it is so easy and inexpensive to create and post banners.
There are several ways to rate the effectiveness of banner advertising, which include:
- Banner Clicks/Click-throughs: The number of visitors who click on the banner ad linking to the advertiser's Web site.
- Banner Page views: This is the number of times a particular Web page has been requested from a server. Advertisers are interested in page views because they indicate the number of visitors who could have seen the banner ad. Although they don't measure the effectiveness of a branding campaign, they do measure how many visitors were exposed to it.
- Banner Click-through rate (CTR): This describes the ratio of page views to clicks. It is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a particular page who actually clicked on the banner ad.
- Cost per sale: This is the measure of how much advertising money is spent on making one sale. Advertisers use different means to calculate this, depending on the ad and the product or service. Many advertisers keep track of visitor activity using Internet cookies. This technology allows the site to combine shopping history with information about how the visitor originally came to the site.
A Buyers Guide to Banner Advertising - Part 2 >>
