Attracting traffic with banner ads

Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing business
on the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day
brick and mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more
dramatic and may have greater impact than in a conventional
business. Success in this climate can only come from quick
response to the changes. Look at web advertisement! Just in a
few short years, we have seen rise and fall of banner
advertisement, email marketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number
of other marketing tools.

Consider banner advertisement. In the beginning of Internet
era, banner advertisement was one of the primer methods of
online marketing. There were not many quality sites in those
days. In search of good feature and content filled websites
visitors were clicking through banners aggressively. Today,
things are totally different! Over using of banners on the web
pages forced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more.
Visitors tend to avoid clicking through the banners unless
there is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that mean the
banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon! Although, banner
click through rate is quite low in comparison to what it used
to be, depending on your objectives banner advertisement can
still be very effective. Banner ads are used today, either for
creating brand recognition or for bringing in more traffic to
the website and consequently generating more sales. Brand
recognition As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies
place banners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently posted on
high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of your
products or services popular to certain niche market, you
should find websites catering this particular audience and
post banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whether they
click on it or not – same like traditional bill boards and TV
advertisements – it helps you building consciousness to your
brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be as
effective as television advertising as far as brand
recognition is concerned. A survey was conducted among members
of American Online who saw an ad of a product as a banner on
the website and on TV commercial. The result indicated that 40
percent of the audience remembers the static banners and 41
percent remembers the TV commercial at the time of the poll
conducted a few days later.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brand
recognition effect from online ad campaign in comparison to
traditional forms of advertisements for around 60 percent less
cost. However, same like offline ads, in order to create a
sustainable brand recognition, your online advertisement
campaign also needs to run for a prolong period of time.

Generating traffic

Banner ads could be a good source of high quality traffic for
your website if you manage your banner ad campaign wisely. If
your main purpose of the campaign is to generate more sales by
attracting traffic - which is any way should be the main goal
of any e-commerce site – you have to select sites to post
banners where you target audience frequently visit. Pay per
click search engines like Overture or Google Adwords are good
options for your textual banner ads. Since the visitors are
already looking for a website like yours by searching for the
keyword that you have selected to place your ad, you get
highly targeted traffic from this.

There are no fixed rules of effective banner ads campaign. You
have to learn the program works best for you by trial and
error. The principal idea behind any advertisement is to grab
viewers’ attention, ignite their curiosity and motivate them
to act. For banner ads it is no different!

The following tips should help you getting better result from
your banner advertisement campaign:

1. Choose an attention grabbing content. Space is so limited in
a banner – same like newspaper headlines – you have to come up
with something that really gets viewer’s attention. Since you
have to do it in one or two sentences, try using something
funny, outrageous but intriguing. You can also use pictures,
which deliver similar effect.

2. Call to an action. Many people like to be guided. Tell them
what to do such as “Click here” or “Go to the website”.

3. Focus on one offer. Your banner ad should carry one single
message. By including several offers in one ad, chances are
you will confuse viewers rather than intrigue.

4. Make it readable. Even a greatly designed banner will fail
to motivate a viewer if the text on it is not readable.

5. Avoid information overload. Too many pictures, colors and
texts make banners look clumsy. Viewers tend to ignore this
type of banners. Animated banners should have less than four
frames.

6. Don’t use heavy banners. Make sure that your banner file
size is less than 5K. Bigger files take longer time to load.

7. Test your banners before publishing. Check how your banners
will look with different browsers. Verify that the banner link
URL is correct and linked to the right page on your website.
Whenever, you make changes to your website, make sure to
double check your banner ads.

Recent practice shows that a banner, which looks like a text
has 4 times more click through rate than a conventional banner.
So use text banners to increase efficiency of your banner ad
program.

Since advertisement is the main source of income for many
websites banner ads are here to stay. Although, there is no
doubt that their look and use will constantly be evolved.

Evonne Llewellyn - Publisher, Webmaster and successful Home
Based Business Owner. Subscribe to Success Solutions
Globalzine published since 1998 and get the solutions and
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