Can Banner Advertising Work For You Or Is It Just For Big Companies?

Posted Posted in Banner Advertising     

Can Banner Advertising Work For You Or Is It Just For Big Companies?

Banner advertising, if done correctly, can work for anyone. You see more and more small online and offline businesses funneling banner traffic to their websites.

It is apparent, web banner ads vary in content and type of display size. Although the common size is still 468 pixels wide and 60 pixels in depth.

Assuming that you already have an ad banner, can you purchase space at an affordable rate? Yes, especially in our present economy when many of the big guys are pulling back on their marketing budgets leaving an opportunity for smaller companies.

There are basically three programs to purchase banner advertising space:
1. On a cost per thousand (CPM) impression rate. Usually once you make this type of purchase, your banner ads will go out through an advertising network to a group of small websites who would get a slice of the banner ad revenue. Of course, you could also purchase this space on a CPM basis from a heavily trafficked website. CPM rates may vary but suppose you pay for 10,000 impressions (or showings of your banner) and you have a click-through-rate (CTR) of ½ of 1% or 50 clicks. Your cost per click is:
2. On a pay for performance (cost per click / CPC) basis. Here is where you pay nothing unless someone clicks through to your website (i.e. guaranteed traffic or you pay nothing). Suppose you agree to pay .75/click. Now if 50 visitors click through to your site, you will pay .50 for that traffic. In this example, buying ad banner space on the CPC basis would be more cost effective than on the CPM basis.
3. On a “term” placement basis. A smaller website, getting very little traffic may offer you a deal to keep your ad banner on their site for a week, month or longer term but their rates are usually considerably more than the two other programs. The benefit of this would be if you were targeting a local market and you knew they drew local traffic. For example, if you were a dealer of photocopy machines and wanted to reach the local businesses in your immediate area, you could contact your local Chamber of Commerce and ask if they sold banner advertising on their website. Usually their website would have less traffic and banner advertising would cost more however the traffic that it did have was the exact match for those most likely to purchase your photocopiers.

In the CPM example above (#1), you might be concerned over such a low click-through rate. Well, that is the nature of the beast. I would always refer to this as the spillover rate. Were you to advertise on television, not everyone would pay attention or take action once your commercial airs. Or look at the percentage of people who respond to a newspaper ad. In each of these cases they also have a huge spillover rate. (I remember a quote from William Black, founder of Chock full o’Nuts coffee that when he was told by his ad agency that he had to realize that fifty cents out of every dollar he spent on advertising would be wasted. Black responded that he only wanted them to spend the fifty cents that would not be wasted.)

You might be wondering who will put your banner ad together for you? For a snazzy, animated ad look to your supplier. You can also place an ad for a banner ad designer on one of the freelance websites. For a basic banner ad, use a search engine and search for something like: online banner ad generator and do it yourself.

You might find banner advertising a useful traffic building tool. Or you might find it not as cost effective as other forms of advertising for your website. In either case, you will not know unless you try.