Impressions, Costs, and Benefits of Banner Ads

Posted in Banner Advertising     

Because surfing the internet is perhaps one of the most commonly done activities by almost everyone in the world, the internet has become a very good medium for advertising businesses. When you visit different websites, you see these flashy ads that bring you to different web pages called banners.

Banner advertising is a form of online advertising using banners with hypertext links and flash images, and when users click on them they are directed to products and web pages where they can order them. Recently it has been experiencing quite a slump because users tend to readily ignore them, therefore decreasing the effectiveness of the advertisement as a whole.

The costs of banner advertising do not only depend on advertising on the host website but on the action that the user does while viewing the ad – a user either does something that will lead him to the advertiser’s page directly or by simply clicking the ad. But because banner advertising is significantly cheaper compared to other elaborate marketing and advertising strategies, it is considered to a very effective advertising technique for companies that do not have deep pockets allotted for marketing and promotion endeavors.

Regardless of the controversial drop in banner advertising effectiveness in the recent years, it is still undeniable that banner ads create a certain effect on the people’s minds. This subconscious effect or subliminal perception influenced by banner ads of a certain product have been widely accepted to increase the sales of the product being advertised in the banner.

Also, as the user increases the time that is spent in front of the computer, the chances are good that they will visit the ad and possibly be directed to the sales page. This is actually great use, since we all know for a fact that people greatly spend about 80% of their daily lives sitting in front of a computer.

Aside from the size of the banner ads, there are a lot of playing factors that determine the average cost of banner advertising. The primary determining factor is the popularity of the website that you are advertising on – the more popular the website that you publish your banner ad on, the more chances your ads being clicked on, hence the more expensive the ad space will be.

Another determining factor is the content of the ad (many advertisers prefer advertising on sites that are highly relevant to their advertisement) – if your ads have graphically mature content, then the rates are higher. On top of that, the position of the ad also plays an important role in determining how much your banner ad will cost.

The average cost of banner ads is around 50 cents per 1000 impressions. But on websites with premium status, the rates are actually higher.