Fundamentals of Banner Advertising: Part 1

Banner ads are amongst the prominent advertising units on the Web today. An e-commerce website or other small-business setup, they bring in the traffic. About 60%cent of advertising online takes place in the form of banner ads only, hence, proving that there is perhaps no replacement of the banner ads to mark your brand’s presence.

Although a lot many marketing experts are claiming that for banner ads, the time to shine is over. However, this cannot be true in its entirety. If there are few fundamentals that are understood and fed well to the new and old brands, banner ads can still do the trick.

Before we get to the technical part, it’s best to understand the basics.

Banner Advertising Defined

If you lost us where we said ‘banner advertising’ then hear us now that it is a form of online advertising with the help of banners. Display advertising is another name for it. It may consist of an image, alongside some text, or it could even be a multimedia object attracting you. There is no such obligation to them being static or animated for different organizations may use different tactics and technology to display their ads.

Effectiveness of Banner Ads

The effectiveness of banner ads is measurable. Take the click-through rate (CTR) indicator in an account to measure the effectiveness. It is easily calculated when you divide the number of users who have clicked on the ad by the number of time it was displayed. The latter/denominator is also called impressions. So if someone tells you that the CTR is 6%, now you know that out of the 100 impressions, the banner has been clicked on six times.

Standard Size of a Banner Ad

Hover over various websites all around the Internet and you are to find banner ads displayed in several different sizes. Only a few of them follow standards which make the job for the design agencies easier as they don’t become the victim of designing for various different sizes. The sizes are usually similar for various different publishers. Perhaps the most popularly and commonly used banner size is 468×60 which seems like a perfectly compact size for a banner. In order to get it noticed, it has to be big enough to stand out. Take a look at these guidelines to get a clear idea about the standards. We will talk later regarding how to get the actual job done.

Placement of Ads

Placement of banner stands equally important to the quality of the banner. It is a representation of your brand and so needs to be just perfect! According to research, banners placed at the top of the page turns out to be more effective than those at the bottom. This is because they have a much higher chance of being clicked right away. Also, if you place two banners on a single page, studies claim that the chances of click-throughs increase.

While this was all about the basic concepts of banner ads, you can find out more about the technical terms usage and ways of banner advertising in the next post. Don’t miss it!