Banner advertising is a more traditional type of web advertising. For many years banner ads were considered to be not very effective, however, they are making a come back. What makes banner ads more successful has to do with where they are located and how compelling their offer is.

Many tout that banner ads are not effective because people have learned to ignore them. Granted there are some advances in technology that allow ads to get in your face more and are just as quickly disabled by smart browsers. I submit that a carefully placed ad with a great offer will be well worth the investment.

Where to Advertise

It makes sense to advertise where there is more traffic. The Arizona Republic has a web site called AZCentral.com and this a great example of a high traffic web site. It has a page rank of 7 from Google. This site combines both print and television news, so for the locals in Phoenix Arizona this is a great site to get caught up with the day’s events.

While this may be an expensive place to advertise, your investment is pretty much guaranteed to work versus buying banner advertising at an “unknown” site. That may seem obvious, but I get sales calls from so called “news” sites or local business directories that nobody knows about and yet there are paid advertisers on them. They may be “seeded” which is a technique to make the site appear to already have advertisers, but my “true blue” test is to look at the page rank. For more on page rank read this article on link popularity.

You can save some money by picking a web site that has a niche market like an online pet store or a photography site for hobbyists. They may not get a lot of traffic, but the quality of the traffic may better for you.

Ad Jargon and Making A Deal

Large traffic sites like AZCentral have advertising account representatives that help you determine the best strategy for your budget. You won’t find a price list with these sites because the possibilities are endless and exacting. So you need to work with them closely.

Banner ads are served to be viewed and these are called Impressions. Cost is associated with impressions so you will hear the term CPM which stands for Cost Per Million meaning the cost to serve a million impressions. To determine the effectiveness of an ad you may hear the term CTR which stands for Click Through Rate.

So, if you get 1000 clicks on 1,000,000 impressions, your CTR will be .01%.

According to the industry .05% CTR is considered good.

The AZCentral web site is a good example for custom ad placement as well. It would be cost prohibitive to display your ad everywhere on the site, but they can customize your ad campaign to appear on certain pages and in certain sizes and locations on the page. They can even taylor your ad to appear at certain times of the day and to certain zip codes as well. Being specific can help show your ad to the right customers, making your burn time on the impressions more effective and targeted.

Good advertising sites will give you good reporting each week so that you can adjust your ad campaign even further.

Spending money on a banner ad campaign only makes sense if you have a good offer to attract click throughs.

How to Make a Compelling Offer

First consider an offer that has a time limit and that is significant enough for someone to click on it to find out more. For example; “50% of Cell Phones this Week Only!”.

There are other advertisers on the same page as you so you will need to stick out. A simple 2 or 3 frame slide show helps get your message across in a little space. The movement of the slide changes help get eyeballs on your ad. Most of the ads you see on AZCentral are animated in a variety of fashions, so you may need to be clever as well as bold to get good CTR.

There are many custom ad sizes to consider. You might want to begin producing with your designer, at the very least, a collection of animated banners either in Flash or GIF.

Sizes in pixels:

• 300 x 250
• 160 x 600
• 728 x 90
• 120 x 60
• 468 x 60

Connect your banner ad to a landing page that contains a “Call to Action”. This would be a page that does double duty. First, it should explain more about this great offer. Then secondly, it should require the user to act. For example, “To receive a coupon redeemable for this offer you must type in your contact information, name, email, phone etc.”

Landing pages also help identify the leads as coming from one campaign versus another which will help you measure the effectiveness of the ad. If you don’t have the ability to produce a landing page specific to your offer, the account representatives at AZCentral can build one for you off of their server. The data is yours to do what you want. More about Landing Pages here.

The worse thing you can do is point customers directly to your home page. It is better to have a narrow channel to herd your leads into for measurement and quality. Most of all you need to be specific and consistent with your message between both your banner ad and your landing page.

Posted on June 28th, 2008 by Karl Knelson
Filed under: Web Marketing | No Comments »