|
Articles Index >> Marketing
The Banner is Dead – Long Live the Banner
by Michael Cheney
Many website owners, when thinking of advertising online, immediately turn
to pay per click or cost per click options (PPC or CPC). What this involves
is simply setting up an account, with Google Adwords or Overture or Yahoo for
example, and adding keywords to an advert. Whenever your advert is shown on
a search engine and someone clicks on it, you then get charged.
This has become a great model for people to enter into the online advertising
arena at an entry level. But what a lot of people and webmasters are forgetting
is that the web banner is still a viable option to driving traffic to your website.
Many people talk about the banner as being dead and that the standard format
of 468x60 pixels is no more. And it’s true, to an extent, that web visitors
are suffering from what is called “banner blindness”. They see this
shape on a website and their mind subconsciously recognizes it as an advert
and immediately turns off or ignores it.
In an attempt to combat this, agencies have started to develop more unique
and innovative ways of creating image based adverts. You can now get pop-up
adverts that appear as people land on a site. You can also get small, animated
button adverts that are not as intrusive as the large, standard banner size.
There is also a format called a skyscraper banner which fills one side of a
page. You can even get banners that fill the whole screen. The thing about advertising
with banners is that it is still a viable option to making money online.
What you need to do, if you’re going down this road, is to focus on banner
ads that include words. A lot of banner ads focus on the images within the banner
rather than the actual words. Create a banner ad campaign that actually includes
words and headlines in the banner predominately.
You should thoroughly track and test which banners are performing best, which
networks perform best for you, which banners get the highest click through rates
and have the lowest cost. With banner advertising you can buy cheap and target
very effectively. Some costs start as low as seven cents per 1,000 banner impressions.
Always have an objective in mind for each campaign. Don’t just advertise
without thinking about the objective. Start out with the goal page first. Think
about where you are actually going to be sending people on your website and
how you can get that page to convert as many people as possible into leads or
sales.
You can also use banner advertising if you just want to raise general awareness
of your brand.
As with all online marketing activities, try to follow in the footsteps of
others who have gone before you and been successful with banner advertising.
Back to top | 
