Banner Advertising
Expose yourself in public and get the traffic moving!
OK so the above line has to be taken with a pinch of salt - basically what it means is drive more traffic to your website by placing targetted banners on other public facing websites.
What is Banner Advertising?
In a nutshell banner advertising is paying for a graphical image to be displayed on another website which when clicked directs the viewer to your website. A banner can take on various forms from a standard animated (or not) image at the top of a website to mid page units (MPUs), expandable banners, skyscrapers, video adverts and so much more. Basically a banner can be whatever size and format the provider website specifies, it can sit anywhere in the page and can do pretty much anything depending on the provider specifications.
How much does it cost?
Unfortunately there's no fixed sum for banner advertising and it really depends on the banner type, location, the providers reach and volume of traffic - and more specifically how much that particular website provider wants to charge.
There is, however, a standard few ways of paying for banners. The most commonly used is the cost per impression (often called Cost per Mille: CPM; or Cost per Thousand: CPT) - this is basically you pay a set amount for 1000 impressions. A banner impression is basically a single showing to a single viewer. For example if you payed for 10 impressions and I visited the site and saw your banner that would use up one impression - if you then checked the site to make sure your banner is there, that uses another impression - if you get all excited and tell all your workers and they check it out that could cost you all your impressions and your banner then stops showing to anyone. Most websites have sophisticated rotation systems which will rotate your advert along with other advertisers and will often track impressions and hits against IP addresses so that the same ad is not served multiple times to the same person - or if it is then it doesn't count as multiple impressions - otherwise your competitors will just keep hitting refresh and use up all your impressions essentially knocking you off and wasting your investment.
Another payment method is cost per click (CPC) - this is often preferred by advertisers as they only pay for the advert when a visitor clicks on it. CPC advertising is oftem more expensive than CPM/CPT advertising but the results are often better.
Why use banner advertising
Banner advertising is great for putting yourself in front of pre-qualified and targetted audiences in an engaging and visually stimulating manner. Banners are often high impact and highly targeted, plus a good banner advertising campaign would accurately assess the audience of the provider website making sure the banner only displays to a highly targeted or receptive audience. This pre-research will usually incur highly focussed click throughs and potentially increase the return on investment for this campaign compared to a scatter gun campaign where anyone is a target.
Does banner advertising work
Simply - yes, but we have to add the caveat that it only works if your targets, research, messaging and create are well thought out and executed. Also banner advertising should only form part of your overall marketing mix and not be relied o as the only source of driving traffic to your website. Banner advertising also works better on particular types of sites, whereas others are not so effective - this should always be taken into consideration during the planning and research stage of a campaign.
Serious banner advertising
Serious Digital Ideas consistently turn out effective banner advertising campaigns due to an understanding of the medium, good relationships with various advertising platform providers but most importantly because of the research and planning we put in at the beginning. If you want to know more about Serious banner advertsing services then phone 01932 835850. Alternatively have a look at some of the other areas we are working in:
Let us help you make Serious impact with banner advertising
Top tip
Always take into consideration the audience of the provider website and the type of advertising they are most susceptible to. Also take into account the reason why that website gets the amount of traffic they do and why their visitors are there - for example a Social Networking site (like Facebook) generate huge aounts of traffic, however, their visitors are there to engage with their friends - not to buy products. Does this mean Facebook is bad for advertising? Not necessarily but the advertising message and creative needs to remember this and should play more towards that audience. The key is to always remember the environment of the viewer and make sure you advert fits - otherwise it will stick out as an irrelevant advert and not generate clicks. For more on Social Network advertising sign up to our
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