While not as effective as it was in the early days of the internet, banner advertising is still worth a small part of your advertising budget. The important thing to remember with banner advertising is that as a rule your banners will be shown many more times than they will be clicked, expect this.
There are two main types of paid banner advertising CPM which are the cost per thousand banners shown and CPC cost per click. You should always try to find the second form of advertising. Find websites that are willing to offer you a guaranteed number of clicks rather than a guaranteed number of impressions. With the CPM model, you could pay for 10,000 impressions, your banner could be shown 10,000 times and clicked only 2 times. Hardly effective.
If you can find websites that offer CPC banner advertising, it is well worth your investment, as your banner will simply keep rotating until you have received the number of clicks you paid for.
Because the popularity of banner advertising has decreased in recent years, if you look around, you can find some excellent deals. Some of the BIGGEST companies in the world use lots of banners, so that should tell you it should be part of your marketing too.
You should also make sure that you are given full statistics on your banners exposures and clicks. Preferably including IP logs, that way you can see which IP address is clicking your banner to make sure they are actual user clicks and not those of a fraudulent competitor (Yes they exist).
One thing to remember when banner advertising is that you need a strong banner. Try to make it original, avoid free banner making services that use templates. Why? Because invariably hundreds or thousands of sites have used the same banner, it is an image. If web users have seen a similar image elsewhere, they may not look at the text of the banner ad, as they think they have seen it before.
How Can I Have Banners Made For My Site?
If you have no knowledge of creating your own banners we can create custom banners for you, just pop in a support ticket and ask us about it.
