Banner Ads
Journey of Internet has just begun. Internet is attracting mass users. Today users just get introduction for product but once they are assured with security part definitely they will buy on the spot.
Amazon.com is excellent example of online book shopping. E-Bay is another successful example of shopping experience online. Thus it is necessary to attract buyers online on the spot.
Web surfers are accessing general portals (vortals). Yahoo, MSN, AOL and many other portals & vortals are expert in making mass web surfer group. Where else will you get mass to advertise? B2B portal is common interest (e.g. Diamond & Jewelers portal) where you can advertise for your product and likely to be visited for the same. Google provides advertising link on right hand side with key word searched by the user. Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales “The decision to wade into banners came after nine months of interviews with Web surfers, publishers and advertisers, and was based on what he called Google’s core mission”..
Internet is becoming interactive medium. Submit request form, contact us, e-newsletter, forward to your friend, ideas forms and neural programs enable buyers & sellers interaction more user friendly and worthy. Marketers are beginning to redefine brands in ways that take advantage of the interactive nature of Internet.
Now a days banner ads are not so boring. Due to increase in speed of Internet due to DSL, cable and wireless high-speed technologies – transfer of big bytes is possible easily. Flash based animated advertising makes banner ads look up totally different.
It is possible to target those who can be prospective buyers. So flash your banner ad on such sites or portal where you can get interested personnel. Web marketers are getting better at communicating with online customers. If it is not in interest of visitors, banner ads can become intrusive too.
Problems with banner advertising are:
– All of target audience is not on Internet.
– Online listeners have so many other things in mind. All are not what we want. They are highly scrappy and fragmented.
– We have not reached yet up to the remark in online branding.
– If it is unrelated, it is intrusive and disturbing to see ad online.
– Integration between online & offline business is not yet established.
Measuring Banner Ad’s Success
Click Through Rate (CTR)
CTRs range from the industry average of about 0.39% to 10%. The more targeted the banner exposure, the higher the CPM (cost per thousand banner views). The banner ad 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. 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.
Cost Per Sale
A much more important figure is the actual cost of making the sale of a product from banner ad. Don’t care how high the CTR is if it doesn’t result in a proportionate number of sales. Many advertisers keep track of visitor activity using Internet cookies. If you just measure clicks, you are not capturing the real effect of advertising, What you want to see is whether people are purchasing items.
Branding
Banner ads create brand awareness, and a brand image in the viewer’s mind, whether or not the viewer clicks on the ad. Brand awareness is sometimes measured in surveys with questions such as: “What brand names can you recall in the field of drink?” If it is due to banner ads, yes it is addition to your banner ad campaign. The majority of the company’s banner ads focused on brand-building, and typically consisted of the name of the Web site and a line describing the benefits of purchasing from the site. More than eighty percent of the company’s advertising activity during this period was on portal and alliance Web sites such as Yahoo!, America Online, Women.com, iVillage.com, Healthcentral.com, and E*Trade. A given banner ad typically appeared on these sites over several weeks.
Page Views
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. The most common way to sell banner ad space is cost per thousand impressions, or CPM (In roman numerals, M equals a thousand).
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