Advertising with banner ads

paid advertising through banners

Banner ads are an important facet of today’s online advertising world.  whether it’s a free or reciprocal banner, a specifically targeted ad, or a paid banner campaign that encompasses many different sites, there are a number of tips that should be kept in mind.  The Internet is without a doubt the most powerful sales tool to be invented since the television, but in order for it to be successful, it has to be used in a progressive and enticing way.  Before we look at tips that are specific to sites, let’s take a look at things that make up a successful banner ad campaign.

Use visual appeal.  In many ways, advertising on the Internet, specifically banner ads, can be directly compared to television, at a tremendously lower cost to the advertiser.  They should contain crisp, easy to read fonts, to begin with.  It is difficult to gain a new customer if they must invest effort before they’ve even gotten to the sales pitch.  Bright colors for bold fonts is a common method of holding someone’s interest in a banner.  Use those large clear fonts to display free or low-priced offers.  Another useful method is to employ celebrity or other famous items, whether it is a place, thing, or person.  Celebrities are respected and followed.  People have a tendency to use the same products as popular personalities, eat the foods, and go to the same stores that these people recommend.

Be insightful, entertaining, or informative.  For best results, do all three. Animated graphics or even actual video are good methods for doing this.  Lists and tips draw a person’s eye to the banner.  Humor is an excellent sales tool.  Knowledge is power.  An enticing game can be a fantastic lure to get someone to click on your banner, and will generally make use of one or more of the other facets mentioned above.

Whether it is a free banner, or one that is paid for and placed on a high profile website, the key is to convince the viewer to take the first step and click on the banner.  Regardless of the traffic on a site, you can expect no more than 2%-5% percent of the people who see the ad to click on it.  The more artistic and entertaining your banner is, the higher that share of click through visitors you can expect, and 5% of the visitors to a site that gets a thousand visitors per day or more is a very impressive number.  To get a higher percentage than this, it may be a great idea to place the banner on an industry specific site, making it targeted towards a particular audience which is already interested in the products or services you are offering.

But that’s enough about the psychology of advertising to get you started.  Let’s look at the possible markets involved, and how they are accessed.  Most banner ads are targeted via the use of keywords, while others are only displayed to certain audiences in the first place, and may even then be keyword specific as well, which reduces the number of viewers the banners gets at the same time as it increases the percentage of people who will actually click on it.  Placing a banner on a directory service is an excellent way to get started.

Pay per click advertising is exactly what the name implies.  The owner of the banner pays a set amount for each person who clicks on their ad, whether that person participates in the site once they get there, or not.  It has been proven again and again that a properly targeted ad is a profitable investment, and that the profits are also available for the owners of sites where the ads are placed.  Yahoo, as an example, was one of the first websites to use banner advertising, and hasn’t wavered in its dedication to this revenue source for over 10 years.  And for the banner owner, there simply isn’t any other way to reach such large numbers of people in a way as cost effective as the world wide web.

Today, Google owns AdWords, which is the largest single source of keyword specific advertising on the Internet.  Using its leverage as the largest, most respected search engine in the world, Google’s ads are laced not only on its own site, but on partner and client sites the world over, and offering banner owners a degree of success that was previously unimagined by all but the most persuasive and expensive of internet advertising concepts.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com