As we
continue to look at advertising on the web, we were going to have
to touch on the subject of banner ads and web rings. Banner ads are
graphics (usually of a set size - more on that later) that act as
the billboards of the Internet. Log on to any large site (Yahoo!,
Amazon, eBay, etc.) and you'll see banner ads displayed in all kinds
of places. These portals have found ergonomic ways to place these
ads, though it wasn't always so. During the heyday of the Internet
(about two years ago), you couldn't go anywhere without being flooded
with banner ads, pop-up banners, rotating banners, and animated sequences
of all kinds. Not so any more, except on the most amateurish of sites.
Banner
ads were touted as the best advertising on the web. Find a site with
a huge number of daily visitors, buy some "ad time" for
your banner and you'll be living large. Not so any more. Except on
a few rare sites, banner ad click- rates have dropped below 1%. This
means that if you spend only $3 per thousand impressions, you may
have 10 people click on the banner to visit your site. So you just
spent three bucks to get ten people to visit your site. Not very economical
advertising.
Banner
ads are usually created in specific sizes, the most common of these
are: 468 pixels wide by 60 high (full- size), 234 pixels wide by 60
tall (half), 120 pixels high by 240 tall (vertical), 392 pixels wide
by 72 tall (vertical "menu") and 125 pixels wide by 125
tall (button).
When
you buy ad space on a website, you usually pay per x number of impressions.
An impression is a page load, meaning every time someone loads the
page with your banner (whether they are loading the page for the first
time or not), the banner has made an "impression." Sometimes
these are measured in the hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands.
These rates are dependent upon several factors including the site's
popularity (number of visitors per day/week/month), the spot in which
your ad appears (sometimes called "screen real estate" or
"position"), and a few other factors.
Despite
the drawbacks, many businesses still use banners to advertise their
websites or products. Although most marketers would advise smaller
businesses and those on a tight marketing budget to use a different
method of advertising, there are some merits to banner ads. Banner
ads are still one of the most popular and useful ways to "brand"
your business, product, personality, etc.
If you're
still interested in banner advertising, then you will need to know
a few things to get started. The first items are of basic marketing
strategy. Who is your target audience? Where do these people go regularly
when they're surfing the Internet? What other sites appear when searching
for sites similar to yours? Do those sites offer banner advertising?
It may seem sneaky, but this can be a great way to increase your search
popularity in a roundabout way.
If you
know most of those answers (especially the first two), then you are
ready to get your banner ad created. First, brainstorm some ideas.
Look around at businesses similar to yours and how they're advertising.
Most banner ads are catchy in some way: either through animation,
"trickiness" ("Punch the Monkey & Win!"),
or humor: or any combination of those. If you can, create a story
board or at least a written description of what you'd like to see
in your banner. Once you know what you want, it's time to create it.
You can either do it yourself (probably not recommended if you aren't
an accomplished graphic artist) or pay someone else to do it for you.
Prices can range considerably, but most will charge between $40 and
$100 for a basic banner. Shop around a little until you find someone
with the style you're after in their portfolio and who's inside your
price range. Before you hire them, go through the steps in the next
paragraph to find out where you plan to purchase ad space. This way
you'll know what dimensions your ad should have.
Before
you purchase ad space on site x, you should know a few things about
what you're buying. Does the site use rotational software to move
ads or change them periodically so that user's don't get bored seeing
the same ads all the time? Does the site have third-party verification
of their purported hits per day/week? What options do they offer for
placement of your ad and can you time it by day of the week or even
hour of the day? Finally, what size of banner advertisements do they
accept and which one will you need for it to fit in the spot you want
to buy?
Now that
you have the information, you're ready to get started. Right? Well,
maybe. You have another option for banners besides just animated .GIF
files. If you have extra money to spend and the site you wish to advertise
on accepts them, you can have a FlashT animated banner with movement
and even sound. They are expensive, but are becoming more prevalent
and tend to be "catchier" than normal banners. The down
side is that not a lot of web sites will accept these types of ad
and the ad placement itself can be more expensive because of the extra
bandwidth needed to serve the larger file size. If you can overcome
these obstacles and do it, these ads will garner a much higher rate
of interest from prospective customers than a standard banner ad will
ever be able to.
Other
forms of banner advertising are called web rings and link cooperatives.
These systems usually operate in one of two ways. The most common
is for a "hub" site to supply the links, software, and to
serve up the banners themselves. Another is for each site to have
the software on their server and for banners to be "grabbed"
from the site they advertise. The first is easiest for everyone involved
and offers other options as well.
In a
web ring, a "click" system can be used to give "points"
to sites which get someone to click-through to another site in the
web ring. The more points the site has, the more often their own banner
is shown on other sites as advertisement. This works well for some
sites, but tends to be counterproductive for others. It is a fair
system in theory and usually in practice, but takes time to build
on. Most point systems clear or average the points every month or
so. This continues to give bonuses to sites that have been in the
ring the longest, but keeps the system fair for new sites to build
themselves up as well.
Another
common option is similar to the first but is a one- for-one system
instead of a point system. In this setup, every time someone clicks
through your site to another in the web ring, you get your banner
shown x number of times on other sites in the web ring. This is more
of a reward system for generating leads to other sites.
Either
way, the biggest down side to web rings is that you have no control
over who's banner shows on your site (or very little if they do allow
filtering), the sites are usually inter-related and therefore your
competitors are likely to show up, and finally they don't always look
professional and tend to draw visitors away from your site- which
is the opposite of your reason for advertising in the first place.
Link
cooperatives are a little more useful in building traffic and recognition
for your website and business. Using this, sites of similar interest
who are not competing can trade links to one another using "flow-through"
software (which moves the surfer through the sites like a storybook),
straight links traded one-for-one (I put a link on my site and you
put one on yours), or with an inter-site search engine which searches
every site in the cooperative and shows results to the user, with
portal pages to the search engine appearing on each site. Of the three,
this last one is hardest to find but most useful. You get to trade
content with other sites similar to yours AND you get the benefits
of inter-trading users who are genuinely interested in your site.
Other
systems similar to web rings and link cooperatives exist, usually
as a hybrid of the two. Each of these has their merits, but they are
hard to find and may or may not be what you need in your quest for
online marketing. It's always a good idea to search out your options
and find what's best for your situation. Building a name for yourself
on the Web takes time, dedication, and imagination.
_______________________________________________________
Aaron Turpen is the proprieter of Aaronz WebWorkz, a full- service
provider of Web needs to small businesses.
www.AaronzWebWorkz.com