Banner advertising

You have certainly heard about them. You have probably seen them. Maybe you even are familiar with them – closely familiar. They are bright and attractive, they evoke curiosity and wish to continue. Advertising on the Internet became impossible without them long ago. What are they? They are banners – nice images that contain an appeal to click on them and learn something interesting or visit a website! Speaking more official language, a banner is a graphic image or a multimedia object in one of conventional formats (JPG, PNG, GIF or Flash) that contains a hyperlink to the advertised company or product.

Banner advertising is one of the most well-known, popular and effective methods of advertising on the web. Using banner advertising you can improve the recognizability of your company on the Internet, attract a bigger number of visitors to your website, increase the interest in the products and services you advertise.

First of all let us take a closer look at banners themselves. A good banner is a certain idea that should evoke the visitor's interest and make him want to click on the link. Until recently banners used to be static bitmap images. But computer technologies do not stand still, and now you can come across animated Flash and GIF banners that are sometimes accompanied by music. However, in spite of all variety of development methods there are certain common constituents of a good banner which are usually used by all developers:

1. Presence of a slogan – a laconic and easy-to-memorize advertising phrase.
2. Presence of a visual component – a graphic image that acts as the central element of the whole composition and illustrates the slogan.
3. Presence of additional text – the URL of the web page or explanatory text.

Banners are subdivided into common banners and image-forming banners – the latter are designed to support your company's image on the Internet. The color gamma of image-forming banners is of great importance: it should coincide with the colors that are used on your website or by your company in general. Very often image-forming banners also contain the company logo.

Depending on the type of banners, places and goals of their display banner advertising splits into several types. Internal advertising is used within a certain site – its goal is to attract the visitors' attention to certain news, new products or services. The brand type of banner advertising is used to improve the recognizability of a brand among the users of the World Wide Web. Targeted advertising attracts the target customers, i.e. the users who are interested in buying your product or service, or in acquisition of information placed on your site. Information web banners are used to evoke the user's desire to click on the link and learn more about the advertised product.

To make banner advertising work effectively you have to place your banners somewhere. Banner placement is provided by commercial advertising platforms or banner networks that can be both commercial and free of charge. A site that provides banner placement services offers you a certain area where your banner will be displayed – an advertising platform. Everything is very simple: you pay for displays, and the owner of the platform places the banner on the pages of his website. The main benefit of this way of advertising is its targeting. You place your banner on a particular site that is devoted to a certain topic and filled with appropriate content. Thus you increase the probability that the visitors will be interested in clicking on your link.

Banner networks are unions of websites that place their banners on each other's pages. They work on one principle: “You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours”. Having registered in a banner network, you become its member. Now you can place your banners on other websites that participate in this network and display their banners on your website. Your banner will be displayed on their websites so many times, as many times you have displayed the banners of other network members on your site minus the banner network commission fee. Administration of free banner networks usually takes its percentage (in displays) of the number of displays you have and uses it at its own discretion.

You can suspend the display of your banners – in this way you will accumulate them. Accumulated displays are a kind of currency in a banner network. They can be transferred from one member to another (however, not all banner networks allow this option), accumulate them further or use them all at once. However, sometimes the circumstances are such that the most of the banner network members accumulate displays, and there is nothing to be displayed in the network. Or the opposite variant – all members start using their displays all at once and the aggregate traffic of all members is not enough to display all banners. Both these situations harm banner networks, and their operators do their best to avoid such situations.

Being a member of banner networks you can also choose the sites where you want your banner advertising to be displayed or whose banners you are ready to display on your websites. It is the so-called white list of websites. Usually it is limited by about twenty positions. Along with the white list there is also a black list – the list of sites that are unwanted for banner exchange with you. Thus the targeting of your advertising is performed – you yourself determine the sites where your banner is going to be displayed as well as the time of display.

Speaking about banner advertising one cannot but mention the criteria of assessing its effectiveness. These criteria are based on the number of times when the banner was displayed and the number of clicks on the banner. Click-though rate (CTR), for example, is the ratio of the number of clicks on the banner to the number of times when the banner was delivered. If the banner was displayed 100 times, and 5 users clicked on it, the CTR will be 5%. The higher this rate is the more users will visit your site.

Some users search for easy pray and use special software to cheat clicks and displays. Both banner networks and owners of separate advertising platforms actively struggle against these violators and punish them by confiscating accumulated displays or ceasing to provide further banner exchange services.

To sum the aforesaid up it is worth mentioning that today it is practically impossible to find a website without banner advertising. It is banner advertising that successfully performs the task of attracting customers and is an inseparable part of your company's image on the Internet!

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web banner, web banner advertising, online banner advertising, internet banner advertising, internet advertising, banner ads, targeted advertising, banner networks