Banner_Ads/

Banner advertising is an effective method of online marketing that has
gained currency amongst leading advertisers. These banners are designed
in variable sizes and shapes, to match the needs of the products or
services they promote. But among its variable shapes, square banners are
found to be more lucrative than any other shape, and hence, these are
largely employed by the modern advertisers. Just surf through any of the
big names in blogosphere across web, and you will find frequent use of
the square banners of size 120 x 120 or 125 x 125 pixels. These banners
boast of a variety of key attributes to help the marketers in achieving
the final goal of increasing profits.

It is found that the advertisers usually look to purchase square shaped
banner spaces on a publisher?s website relying on the advice of online
marketing experts who have asserted that these banners offer maximum
exposure to advertisers. On the other hand, these are also fruitful for
publishers, as they charge handsomely for providing this type of prime
space to advertisers. There are a number of factors that provide square
banners a definite edge over the other shapes which have listed below:

* Visibility – Square banners placed on top of the blog or website has
the highest visibility than the banner of any other shape. These have
high probability of gaining the visitor?s attention. In addition, the
square shape fully displays the content of the banner, and thereby proves
to be very interactive for the visitors.

* Lucidity of website – Visitors usually get annoyed with the cluttered
interfaces of websites, as it sparks utter confusion in their minds.
Hence, maintaining the cleanliness of the website without compromising
the profits earned through advertising is a challenging task for website
owners. Square banners prove to be very helpful in tackling this issue,
as these banners impart a purposeful look to the publishers? website. The
cleanliness also ensures easy navigation of the website that adds to the
satisfaction of its visitors.

* Compatibility – Compatibility has always been a big point of concern
for online marketers, as matching varied themes with diverse banners is a
real tough task for them. But, square banners can be fitted to any of the
advertising themes remarkably. The compatibility factor further adds to
the worth of square banner ads over the other forms.

* Purposeful looks – Due to its simple yet imposing presence a large size
square banner can impart a purposeful looks to the publishers? website.
Further a square banner can pack it a high amount of information thereby
adding to its effectiveness. Squares also seem to have high recall value
and this helps websites to lure new visitors, which in turn helps in
generating more business.

Apparently, it can be safely said that the square banner ads are
lucrative for both advertisers and publishers. Despite adding
professionalism to the publishers? website, these banners ensure a larger
space for interactive navigation, and thereby implicitly add up to the
effectiveness of the advertisement.

Banner Ads-Why Square Ads Are Successful

When they were first introduced banner ads literally became a rage.
Everyone wanted to click on those colorful, flashy ads. One could throw
in a couple of cool looking banners in a website and voila, there you
have clicks and tons of money generated through them.

The more appealing the banners, the more was the surety of clicks. Apart
from being an excellent alternative to television advertising, banner ads
also provided an enhanced visual appeal to the website. The money that
the banners generated with clicks acted like a cherry on top!

In today’s world, the things are a little different, with passage of
time, people have learnt to ignore or simply pass by a banner ad.
Internet users have matured since the late nineties and now they know
what it does and why it is there. This phenomenon is known as banner
blindness and is one of the biggest headaches faced by a webmaster or a
web designer in deciding which or what banner ad to place. Unless the
website visitors really need a product, they won?t click on that banner.

Conversion ratio relates to the conversion of a viewed banner to a
clicked banner. I.e. the number of times a banner viewed by a visitor is
actually clicked by a visitor.

Now the obvious question arises, how can I achieve a higher conversion
ratio? The answer to these questions lies in effective selection,
management and placement of a banner advertisement.

Placement – Proper usage of banner ads would still fetch money for your
bank account. Well many companies are still doing it, and so can you.
Initially, when the banner ad era came, banners were just available in
standard sizes only. This created problems in proper placement of banner
ads. To tackle this problem, there were only two possible solutions,
either you place them anywhere and carry on with a haphazard looking
website design or build your web design around the banner ads. Most of
the professional webmasters chose the latter but because of lack of
proper web design skills, many rookies were stuck with the first choice.

Size – A big change that has come since the time when banner ads first
came is that back then they were usually of one common size. People grew
over them and learnt to ignore them which caused banner blindness to many
websites. Different sizes and shapes of banners ads were then
conceptualized to tackle this problem. Research has shown that people
click some banner ads more than other banner ads because of their size
and shapes.

Choose Wisely – A greater variety in banner ads not only means that
banner ads would become more ?clickable?, it also means that now even
rookie webmasters are able to better incorporate these banner ads into
their website without compromising their web design. Now, instead of
putting banner ads in common places, we can have them in headers,
footers, sidebars and in-between the content also. Doing this takes the
visitors by surprise and because they are not hoping to see a banner
there and as such are likely to be more open to the idea of clicking on a
banner advertisement.

Banner_Ads/Achieving A Higher Conversion Ratio.txt

Banner ads brought with them a new era in efficient and easy to use web
based online marketing. Companies suddenly had a new alternative that was
efficient enough to take television advertising head on and yet was quite
affordable. Because of the cheap and effective nature of banner
advertising, it was an instant hit. From websites to email footers,
banner ads were seen everywhere. Certainly, with banner ads, online
advertising has received a bigger and better platform than ever before.

In case you wish to develop stylish banner ads to promote your business
then do give a look to tips mentioned below for winning design:

* ‘Click Here’ – The usage of words like ‘Click here’, ‘Enter’ and ?Ok?
is very important while creating a banner ad. The usage of these words
would seem mundane but it has been proved through research that these
worlds act like a subconscious stimuli and increase the chances of a
banner to be clicked.

* Animate! – For a banner, there is nothing like an animation to support
its content. An animated banner demands attention and creates interest.
Animated banners are also useful as they complement the design of a
website. Here, care should be taken, to keep the banner animation to a
minimum level, such that it looks good and remains small in size. A lot
of animation means a lot of images, sounds or other multimedia objects;
all this makes a banner bulkier in size and thus increases the time taken
by the banner to load on a computer.

* Size – For a banner, size does matter. It should be of utmost priority
to make banners which are able to load quickly and effectively. Ideally,
a banner should be sized between 10-12 kb. Making a small sized banner
can be difficult when making animated banner ads; in such cases the
banner size should be kept around 15-20 kb at the maximum.

* Headlines – The headline in a banner is one of the most important
things that would attract the visitors. A good looking banner is not
enough for having visitors come to your website. Most users do not give
enough time to a banner and certainly do not care to read through it. A
heading helps the users to know the content of a banner in a single look.
If you are giving a service or product that is free, one of the best
words to use as a heading in your banner could be ‘FREE’. The word
‘FREE’, when included in any heading, almost immediately guarantees
exponential click through rates.

* Blue – The inclusion of blue underlined texts and blue borders have
spelled wonders for banners. A blue underlined text or a blue border is
immediately identified as a hyperlink and thus leaves no doubt in the
mind of a user that the banner will genuinely take him to a website. If
it is a renowned website, Inclusion of the website name around the
lowermost or the uppermost corner serves as an added advantage.

* Change – If you have not changed your banner ads for a long time,
changing of banner ads is also advised. Frequent and loyal visitors get
used to seeing the banners and after say, third time of continuous
viewing of the same banner, learn to ignore it.

These guidelines would help you greatly in creating a banner that works
effectively and efficiently.

Banner_Ads/Creating A Winning Design.txt

Advertising plays a vital role in growth of any form of business. With
the advent of e-commerce, the advertising techniques have undergone
substantive changes; for instance, the traditional bill-boards are now
transformed to banner ads in the online world. Businessmen are now widely
use internet as an effective platform for promoting their
products/services across the web users.

Online advertising have changed the entire methodology of promotional
techniques that were previously in vogue. Businesses now have much wider
reach and they can continuously stay in touch with their customers,
without pooling much effort. Online advertising also encompasses many
forms. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and banner ads rest among the most renowned
forms of online advertising.

PPC and banner ads share many similarities and hence these terms are
often interchangeably used by many web users. However, the two concepts
differ widely in various aspects. The silver-lining between the two must
be demarcated carefully, so as to make the most out of the two forms of
online advertising. Let?s understand the difference between the two
concepts comprehensively in the following section.

Banner Advertising

First of all, let us comprehend the concept of banner ads. As it has
already been quoted that banner ads are in essence online avatars of
traditional bill-boards, these ads serve as signage on websites. But
these ads have an edge over the bill-boards, as advertisers can track the
number of viewers of their ads, a feature common to all types of online
advertising.

Banner ads can be depicted as an explicit method of marketing, as the
visitor promptly takes the action, as soon as the ad is clicked. It can
further employ tracking methods to calculate the ad cost incurred for a
single sale of the product/service. Hence, you can calculate the exact
return on advertising investments and optimise it accordingly.

You might have observed a long list of banner adverts placed along side
the content of most websites that you may be surfing. These banner ads,
popularly termed as ?skyscraper ads?, use to depend heavily on the
traffic of the publisher website. Thus, the advertisers must be attentive
while selecting a publisher website for placing their banner ads.
However, if the publishers? website crashes down, the banner ads placed
on it suffer heavily.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

On the other hand, PPC ads are generally set off as soon as the web
searcher types the keywords into the search window of any search engine.
These ads are primarily based on the keyword phrase typed into the search
engine. PPC ads are more targeted than the banner ads, as it offers
advertisers the flexibility to show their ads based on the keywords
entered into the search box. Thus, this advertising form is very useful
for the advertisers who targets a particular set of web users.

In addition there is another category of PPC advertising called ?content
match? which involves displaying relevant ads as per the content of the
website. Now in case some one is using an ad network platform like Google
Adsense, there are chances that banner ads could be displayed. This is
the primary reason behind the confusion that one experiences in
differentiating both kinds of advertisement forms. However one must note
that such ads do not fall in the category of banner ads in the
traditional sense; even though they share the same characteristics.

Banner_Ads/Different from PPC Advertising.txt

The era of online marketing started with the advent of banner ads. Nearly
every online content publisher started including these easy to use but
effective banner ads in their websites for some extra cash. A major
advantage of a banner ad is its ability to take users from one website to
another on impulse and the money from clicks is just the icing on the
cake.

Today with every other website using banner ads, it is becoming
increasingly difficult for an online marketer to draw attention to his
ads. This challenge calls for some innovativeness in which such ads are
designed and placed. Let us look at some key points that go a long way in
increasing the efficacy of banner ads and generate traffic.

* Relevance – When casual visitors visit a website, there is a higher
chance that they will click on the banner ads that are relevant to the
topic that they are interested in. Your banner ads should be placed on
website with relevant content. A banner ad of a new car launched by an
auto maker would do no good if it is placed on website related to
educational purposes. On the other hand, a banner ad that is placed on an
educational website and tells the benefits of joining a certain
university would greatly increase the number visits that the website of
the university receives. Proper care and research should be done
regarding the content of the website that the banner ad is being placed
on.

* Be Specific – A banner ad about a tools manufacturer is not as
effective as a banner ad about the tool that the tools manufacturer
sells. People are much more interested in the products and services then
the companies that produce them, unless a company represents a product or
service in a true sense, visitors will not be inclined to click on the
banner ad that is about a company. For example, a visitor who wants a
jackhammer is more likely to click on the banner ad which displays the
unique features and price of the jack hammer then the banner ad that
tells about the manufacturer of a jackhammer. Always, if products and
services are to be promoted, the general company website should not be
advertised.

* Proper Hyperlinks – When implementing a banner ad in a website, care
should be taken to link the specific webpage that is advertised in the
banner advertisement rather then the general website. Many visitors find
it difficult to search for a particular page in a website; this would
lead to empty visits. For example, if visitor shows his interest in a
product by clicking on a banner and instead of going to the webpage
dedicated to the product, he is redirected to the homepage of the
website, it would make it difficult for him to find the required product
and because of frustration or other circumstances he may leave without
giving the website any business.

* Proper positioning – Proper positioning of a banner ad is important in
critical in getting the required traffic from banner ads. Ideally a top
position is best suitable for a banner ad, as many people do not scroll
down in a website.

* Content – Banner ads can just be made of static images or flash based
dynamic animations. Proper representation of content is most important in
asserting that a visitor understands the message that a banner is trying
to convey. For better visits, a banner should be attractive, simple to
understand and have proper size to meet the requirements.

Banner_Ads/Five Steps To Create Traffic.txt

The soaring popularity of internet shopping has encouraged online
marketers to devise innovative and effective marketing strategies to
ensure good web traffic to their websites. Banner advertising is one such
effective strategy, which is widely popular among the online advertising
community. In its simplest form banner advertising involves advertisers
placing their adverts on other websites, which usually have larger number
of regular hits. In addition to drawing traffic to an advertiser?s site,
banners ads also make for a great business sense as they bring in
revenues for the website that publishes these ads.

Banner advertising can be carried out on diverse platforms ranging from
mobile phones to websites. This promotional technique requires expert
assistance for carrying out fruitful advertising campaigns. Hence, the
online market is flooded with several banner advertising firms that help
online marketers in obtaining lucrative results.

The most striking part of this concept is that, it is mutually beneficial
for both the advertiser and publisher. As the advertisers get a sure shot
benefit in form of an adequate platform for promoting his website; the
publishers get an additional revenue source in form of banner ads. The
publisher is paid on the basis of pay-per-click system. This implies that
every time the user clicks on to the advertiser?s banner placed on the
publisher?s site, the advertiser needs to pay a predefined sum to the
publisher. So, the concept is being widely embraced as a supplementary
source of earning for such websites.

Now that you are aware how banner advertising really works; let us look
at key concepts that can make it work for you. In order to ensure
successful advertising campaign for your website, try going through the
points mentioned below:

* Check for the Page Rank of the publisher – Make sure that the publisher
you are selecting for promoting your website must have huge traffic on
regular basis. This can be checked by assessing the Page Rank of the
website with prominent search engines.

* Advertise only with closely related website – Advertise only with the
websites that closely resembles to the profile of your website. This will
help users in establishing a link between the publisher website and
advertisements placed on it. This will also help you in optimising your
investments in advertising by exposing the targeted segment to you.

* Design and content of the advertising banner – A lot depends on the
design and content of your advertising banner. Aptly designed banner with
interactive content play a vital role in luring web users. Professional
help for creative an appropriate banner is highly recommended. In
addition to the design and content, make sure that your banner is
positioned suitably on the publisher?s website. As the poor visibility of
your advertisement will be nothing but a sheer waste of money from you.

Banner advertising assures a win-win situation for both publishers and
advertisers. The concept is largely being embraced by the online
marketing community for its simplicity and productivity. A number of the
key internet companies have assumed this advertising methodology for
maximizing their profits and the concept marks a positive trend in
foreseeable future.

Banner_Ads/How They Work.txt

After placing our ads on any platform, we are always interested to
analyze its effectiveness and its share in overall profitability and
banner advertising is hardly an exception to it. Banner advertising
involves placing a website?s ad banner on some other website, in an
attempt to attract large number of customers. In current scenario, this
has emerged as an effective technique for promoting goods and services
across the web. The success with banner advertising can also be
quantified through various efficient tools.

Methods to track performance of Banner ads

Banner advertising proves to be an efficient method for maximizing
productivities. It ensures a wider exposure for your website. Well, in
order to measure the success of banner ads, let?s have look at some of
the most useful techniques:

* Count the number of clicks – The publisher websites sell advertising
space on the basis of cost-per-click. Prepare a database of the users who
click your banner placed on the publisher?s website. This will help you
in counting the total number clicks your banner earned through the
publisher?s website, in a given time. This serves as a direct method for
assessing the performance of your banner ads.
* Click through rate – Click through rate, or simply CTR, is a common
term among online marketers that depicts the ratio of total number of
clicks to the page views. It is expressed as the percentage of the total
number of visitors, who surfed a specific page and banner advertisements
clicked. This will help you in calculating the total number of productive
clicks on your banner.
* Total Page visits – By calculating the total number of page visits, you
can actually reckon the total number of visitors who came across your
banner ad. This technique brings out the exposure of the visitors to your
banner ad. This will present a clearer picture about total number of hits
particular page of your website had.
* Price per sale ? This formula will help you in calculating the amount
you spent on generating a single sale. This further helps you in
optimising the investments you are pouring in banner advertising. You can
always take the assistance of internet cookies for tracking the visitors
on your website.

Banner advertising represents a lucrative environment for both publishers
and advertisers. By linking to the websites of similar profiles, the
advertisers get the much sought after exposure to the targeted customers.
This will remarkably help in boosting profits of the advertisers?
websites. On the other hand, the publisher website also gets benefited
through an additional income from its otherwise unproductive space. Since
banner advertising is beneficial for both the publisher and the
advertiser, it is always prudent for them track the effectiveness of the
ads in a continuous manner.

In addition to these established techniques, the advertisers can also
devise their own tracking mechanisms that can help them in analyzing the
efficacy of their banner adverts. Moreover, professionals? assistance is
always beneficial in seeking out the true picture of the efficiency of
banner advertising. So, do not hesitate to call for the services of a
banner ad agency to reap the maximum benefits of this concept.

Banner_Ads/How To Know They’re Effective.txt

If you are a regular internet user or a casual web surfer you might have
noticed an array of banner ads with different designs and varied
interfaces. If we keep the technicalities aside, banner ads available on
internet are basically of two types namely, image based and Flash based.
Here, we will discuss the various pros and cons of choosing a Flash based
banner advertisement.

PROS

* Visual Appeal: A Flash based banner ad has a high visual appeal. They
can be made to do transitions, change over?s, have rollover effects etc.
All this is nearly impossible with a normal image based banner ad, unless
some high level language scripting methods are used. For example, to play
a Tetris game, a visitor is more likely to click a Tetris animation
styled banner ad then just an image of Tetris game saying ‘Play Tetris’.
Research has showed that people are much more likely to click on a flash
based advertisement then a plain banner.

* Better interface: A Flash based banner interface can be a mesmerizing
treat. Flash based banner ads are more than capable to create animation
like changing text styles, changing images, mouse rollovers, image
effects etc. With its easy to use and easy to make capabilities, a Flash
based banner Ad takes the definition of an interface to new heights.

* Interactivity: This is one area where Flash based banner ads excel.
With flash, banners can be made to have inputs and commands from users
and act with appropriate responses. Flash based applications redefine
interactivity and flash based banner ads do exactly that. For example a
Flash based banner ad can be made to look like a calculator to calculate
the EMI of a car and when a user click on the ‘OK’ button, he could be
directed to the website that provides easy car loans.

* Much more Possibilities: Flash based banner ads have opened up a sea of
opportunities for advertisers. Flash based banners can be called the true
competitors of television based advertising. With flash based
advertising, one can even play videos in a banner! Add to that the
interactivity of choosing the desired video to be watched and you have a
sure visitor.

CONS

* Requirement: One of the biggest negatives of a flash based banner ad is
it inability to be used on a computer that does not have adobe flash
player plug-in installed. This requirement is easy handled by the petite
size of the install, doing this is automatically prompted by the browser.

* Bulky: Flash banners are bulky; or at least the ones that are high on
interactivity and have a rich interface. Due to the images and animation
used in it, a flash banner becomes bigger in size and takes more time to
load then plain banners. When a flash banner is being made, images used
in it should be optimized so as to keep the size of the flash banner to
the minimum.

* Annoying: Flash Banners can be flashy and claim attention from
visitors. Many people, because of various reasons frown upon Flash based
ads. Some claim that such ads prevent them from concentrating on the
website’s content and hence they switch off flash content in their web
browsers or try to visit websites that do not have flash based banner ads.

Banner_Ads/Pros and Cons of Flash Ads.txt

If you have a website or plan to have one, you must surely have given a
though to banner ads. Banner ads are amongst the most cost effective and
easy to use methods for generating money or simply said, monetizing your
website.

But the idea of generating money through your website is not so simple.
Although banner ads are a great way to earn money, today many websites
suffer from banner blindness. Banner blindness is the phenomenon when
users simply ignore the banner ads placed in the website. This
irrelevance of banner ads in the eyes of the user leads to low
click-though rates which in-turn leads to less money generated through
clicks.

With the initial days of banner ads gone, the excitement of clicking on a
cool looking banner ad is also diminishing day by day. Today, even a
casual web surfer knows what banner ads are and why they are used and
this makes it more difficult for a banner to lure them into clicking it.
With time, users have learnt how to ignore a banner advertisement.
websites suffer from banner blindness because of various reasons, poor
placement, wrong size and non uniformity with the overall theme of the
website are some of the main reasons responsible for a the ignorance of
banner ads in a website.

Size is one of the biggest parameters in asserting the goodness of a
banner. Some general guidelines while selecting the size of the banner ad:

* The Larger The Better: Research on the sizes and the click-through
rates generated by various banners have shown that bigger, larger banners
create more interest in visitors and command a high click rate then other
smaller banner ads. Among banners, 728×90 and 300×250 command a higher
chick-through rate over other banners. Placed generally on the header,
between text, sidebar or the footer, the bigger size of these banners and
their elite placement positions give these banners a larger canvas which
makes it possible for them to grab more attention of visitors thereby,
converting even casual visits to clicks.

* Say No to 468×60: Across the board, 468×60 is the banner size that has
shown lowest click-through rates. Being the oldest banner format, users
have learnt to ignore these banners and thus, its low click-through
rates. These banner ads, being small, are not suitable for today’s high
resolution websites. These small banners because of their size are
generally surrounded by the content and thus, not given a major
positioning in the web designs.

* Say Yes to Animation in Right Size: Though many analysts tend to
presume that animated banners may appear childish if you are promoting a
serious product; the fact remains that animated ads are quite successful
in receiving a large number of clicks. That apart one needs to choose the
right size of animated banner adds. Often sleek animated banners in large
rectangular shapes are know to instantly grab attention of users.

Banner ads are considered to be among the most efficient tools for online
marketing and will command their price for years to come. Generating
money from banner ads is not an easy job but is possible in every way, if
certain guidelines of effective placement, positioning and size selection
are followed.

Banner_Ads/Selecting The Right Size.txt