Let Icon Design and Manage Your Banner Advertising Campaign for Maximum ROI
The banner ad has become the staple of basic internet marketing. The banner functions as a link, much as text will function as a hyperlink, or without shortening, “hypertext link.” A link functions with the basic user input of a click. Without clicking on the text, there is no possible way to attract traffic. Banners, however, provide an intriguing artistic capture for the audience, inspiring them to click on the link based on the attraction to the banner that is being displayed in lieu of the link text.
Banner advertising is one of the oldest and most recognized forms of internet marketing. A bit of HTML code instructs a Web server to bring up a particular Web page when a user clicks on a certain piece of text. Banner ads are essentially the same thing, except that instead of text, the link is displayed as a box containing graphics (usually with textual elements) and sometimes animation.
Banner ads have a bad reputation in part because of the proliferation of banner farms that killed all of the “banner swap” programs (or at least made them completely ineffective). Yahoo banners in particular have come along way since then and a cleverly designed banner can be a real asset to any Banner advertising campaign. Also don’t forget that you don’t have to use one of those big giant banners that span the width of the screen. You can use smaller simple ads that can fit easily into the sidebar or special box on a web site so they can suit the design and work more effectively.
It is also important that you pay close attention to what sites you will choose for displaying your banner. IE. A site about web development for your web hosting service ad or a site about parenting for your ad promoting your potty training book.
Icon Website Design aims to get the most out of banner ads; Banner advertising is a real success if the visitor not only comes to the site but also buys something. Failing a click-through, advertisers hope that a publisher site visitor will see the banner ad and will somehow register it in their heads, visually or otherwise. This could mean the visitor consciously notes the content of a banner ad and decides to visit the advertiser’s site at some time in the future, or it might mean that the visitor only peripherally picks up on the ad but is made aware of the advertiser’s product or service.
So there are several ways a banner ad can be successful. Consequently, there are several ways advertisers measure banner ad success. Advertisers look at:
- Clicks/Click-thrus: Thru is just a shortened version of the word “through.” The important element is that “through” means that the traffic is being directed from the viewer through the banner’s link to your web page. The number of visitors who click on the banner ad linking to the advertiser’s website. Publisher sites often sell banner ad space on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
- Page views: Also called page impressions, this is the number of times a particular Web page has been requested from the 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. The most common way to sell banner ad space is cost per thousand impressions, or CPM (In roman numerals, M equals a thousand).
- 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. The typical click-through-rate is something under 1 percent, and click-through rates significantly higher than that are very rare.
- 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.
Different measures are more important to different advertisers, but most advertisers consider all of these elements when judging the effectiveness of a Banner advertising campaign.