When the internet was still growing in popularity, the majority of advertising on websites was done in banner form. Believe it or not, not many people thought about utilizing the internet as an advertising medium until just a few years ago!
Those advertisements that did exist were in the form of flashing banners – the brighter and more garish the better (or so it felt to the casual web surfer). When companies like Google AdWords and Text Link Ads began to surface, banner advertising took a back seat to the less invasive text ads.
Lately, however, banner advertising has become more popular as people have learned how to make different sized banners and have gotten better with flash programming and graphic design. If you would like to know how to generate traffic with banner advertising, here are a few hints to help you out:
1. Just like text-based ads, you need to find advertising services that can target websites in your niche. A banner for a video game subscription service won’t get as many click throughs if it is featured on a fashion website.
2. Do your best to get your banner advertising placed on websites that see a lot of traffic every day. It might be cheaper to advertise on websites that aren’t yet very popular, but the higher cost will be worth it when you see just how quickly your traffic numbers jump. A banner ad that runs for a single week on an incredibly popular website will be worth more than one hundred banner ads running for three weeks on less popular websites.
3. Make sure that your banner itself is designed well. This is an advertisement for your company. You want the banner design to reflect your business’s brand. Something that flashes and gives people a headache probably won’t get as many click throughs as something that is subtle and works well with the background of the site on which it sits.
4. No matter what anybody tells you, banner advertising that involves sounds or videos that play automatically are annoying and will not get clicked on. In fact, these advertisements are often the reason people click away from a website. Just because you know how to make a short video play in your advertising space doesn’t mean you should put that knowledge into play.
A few things to consider before you get start on your banner advertising. You’ll come across several different references to words such as CPA, CPM, CPC. They are all relevant to your campaign:
Cost Per Action
CPA – Meaning cost per action. This is a way of tracking a visitor that comes to your website and takes a specific action (such as adding an item to a shopping cart, or checking out, or requesting a quote).
EX: if you sell professional services then one of the actions on your website will be your quote form or your contact form. CPA will allow you to give that action a price. For some websites that action could be worth a few dollars and for some others a few hundred dollars. It depends largely on how many of those actions convert to sales and how much those sales are worth to you in the short term and even in the long term.
Cost Per 1,000 Impressions
CPM – Meaning cost per 1,000 impressions. This means that each time your banner is seen it will be counted as an impression. So if a visitor on another website sees your ad then that’s one impression. If they go to another page on that website and see your ad again then that’s two impressions. This could also mean that potentially you could have 1,000 people see your ad and even click on your ad.
On average though the amount of people that see your ad and click on it will defer significantly. It depends on where you’re advertising, how well your ad performs in getting visitors to click on it and several other factors.
The secret here is to first find out how much each visitor is worth to you. Meaning if 100 visitors came to your website from advertising and 5 of them buy and generate about $500 in revenue for you then you could pay anywhere between 1 penny (99% Return since your cost is so low) and $5(0% Return since your cost is too high) for each visitor ( 100 visitors X $5 ).
Cost Per Click
CPC – Cost Per Click – This is the most common form of advertising that most businesses are familiar with. This allows you to set prices for how much you will pay for each each click to your website. Using the above example — on average each visitor to your website is worth $5 so as long as you can generate clicks for less then $5 you should have a profitable campaign.
These are just a few ways to generate traffic with banner advertising. Some simple research and a visit to our website will turn up even more hints to help you drive traffic to your website.
