Banner Ads

Banner ads can be a great internet marketing strategy for branding your company and/or increasing sales.

If you surf the internet you certainly must have come across the little rectangular looking advertisements on web pages. These are what we call banner ads.

The aim of a banner ad is twofold:

1. For internet visitors to click on the banner ad that then immediately brings them to the advertiser's website. The ad is successful when people do not only visit the site, but also decide to buy the product.
2. To attract visitors to click on the banner ad that brings them to the advertiser's website. When the click-through does not result in a sale the site visit is still useful to get a visual imprint of the company's website, name and product. This name branding is important as it may influence the choice people make at a later date when ready to buy.

The success of banner ads can be measured in the following four ways:

• Click-throughs: the number of visitors clicking on the banner ad that is linked to the advertiser's website. The advertiser often pays at a cost per click (CPC)
• Page impressions: the number of times a particular web page has been viewed. Although this does not measure the banner ads, it does tell how many visitors were exposed to the ad.
• Click-through rate: the number of times a particular web page has been viewed. Although this does not measure the banner ads, it does tell how many visitors were exposed to the ad.
• Cost per sale: this measures the amount of money that is spent on making a sale.

Most advertisers consider all four elements when analyzing the effectiveness of their banner ads.

One mistake that many online businesses make is using banner ads to reach the greatest amount of people.  Your focus when it comes to banner ads is to reach the right type of people for the product or service that you’re selling.  One thing to keep in mind is that, if you have a limited budget, you should avoid buying banner ads altogether.  If you have a big budget, banner ads can be great for branding your company.  You’ll be able to negotiate contracts that are long term with affiliated websites in your area of business.  However, the results of click-through marketing are usually low and this makes banner ads the least cost effective of all online marketing techniques.

If you decide that you want to purchase banner ads you should focus on buying them on web pages that are very targeted.  Ads are cheaper the more targeted a web page is.  And the cheaper the ad the more cost effective your banner ads will be. 

Another way that you can target the placement of your banner ads is to embed them in web page content.  Before you purchase a banner ad find out what content the website administrators will be including on their web page that may be related to your online business.  If the website uses a keyword search tool ask that your banner ads appear when key words that are linked to your product or service are typed into the search engine by visitors to the website.

Try to place your banner ads on a web page that is as deep into the website as possible.  This way you’ll be reaching people who are truly looking for information that relates to your business.  This is a great strategy to use if you want to get the most value for your online budget.  Again, if your budget for marketing is quite high, you’ll want to buy banner ads on the home pages of websites so that your brand reaches a lot of people.

Another advertising strategy and a very cost effective one is email promotions. Learn about email promotion in our next article.