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A GUIDE TO ONLINE DIGITAL BANNER ADVERTISING

Digital Banner Advertising

The most popular form of web advertising are banner ads. HotWired, the commercial web magazine was the first website to feature banner ads which consist of either text, static images (JPEG/PNG/GIF), animation - most commonly in the form of Flash, or interactivity such as video, games or sound to maximise their appeal. These banner adverts are slotted into a web page with the intention of enticing people into clicking on them, taking the user through to the advertisers page, thus increasing traffic to that site.

Standard Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) web banner ad sizes

Click here for examples of these ads.

Different style of Banner Adverts

Because of the layout of most web pages, banner adverts are usually proportioned so that they can either fit along the top of the page, or down the side of the page content, so that they don't interfere with the layout of the page. There are a range of standard sizes for banner ads - Leaderboards (long and thin), skyscrapers (tall and thin), MPUs (almost square) and buttons/tiles (small and rectangular).

About page impressions and click throughs

Should someone view a website which is displaying a banner advert, the page impressions for that advert would increase by one. If an advertiser has bought a package of 1 million impressions then once the count gets to that number it will no longer be displayed. Should that user, upon seeing the banner advert, click on it to be redirected to the advertiser's website, then the click-through rate would increase by one.

How do websites charge for displaying ads?

They are sold on an either CPC (cost per click) basis, where the advertiser would pay a small amount for every time their advert is clicked on by a unique user, or by page impressions where the advertiser would pay for their ad to appear a fixed number of times (usually in the 1,000s).

How are banners adverts magaged?

In many cases, a website will employ a company to manage their banner advertising campaigns. This companies are known as ad servers and they will deal only with banner advertising, their placement on websites and monitoring page impressions and click throughs.

Monitoring your digital banner advertising campaigns

Internet banner advertising has exactly the same premise as more traditional methods of advertising - Its goal is to create greater awareness of whatever the advertiser has to offer its potential customers, and why they should choose them over their competitors.

On-the-fly updating

However, unlike regular advertising, its performance can be tracked daily and the campaign tailored to its audience.

Don't annoy potential customers

The most successful digital banner adverts can be incedibly beneficial to an advertiser, but a badly conceived advert can be irritating, distracting the user from the content of the page they are there to view. An advert where size limitations aren't taken into consideration can eat up bandwidth.

An advert that is considered too irritating by users can actually undermine an advertising campaign.

Google Adwords banner and text based digital advertising

Google Adwords is something that only appeared on the scene relatively recently and generates the majority of Google's income. It uses PPC (pay per click) advertising, and content targeted avertising on websites for both its banner advertising and text advertising. Text adverts are no more that around 30 words about your site or product and their banner advertising can take the form of any of the standard banner sizes.

Flash Rich Media - Games, Videos and Interactivity

There are other, more dynamic advertising options available which include interaction in the form of videos, games, puzzles, data capture and much more. There are also more in-your face ad slots available which include page peels where the web-page appears to be peeling away in the top corner, revealing an advertising message seemingly 'behind' the page, page overlays where an advertising message sits on top of the web page often filling the entire browser window, expandable banners which expand upon interaction with the mouse pointer, and several others. This is known as 'rich content'.