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Banner Advertising Isn't Dead.. So Use It!
By Guest Writer Dan Grossman. Dan comments on the perception by some parts of the industry that banner advertising has had its day...
Banner advertising surely isn't dead, if you know how to take
advantage of it. While an effective campaign for driving traffic
to your site through banner advertising can cost far too much for
any small business owner's budget, banner advertising can still
be used effectively. It is much more useful as a tool for
branding your site or product or attracting leads.
If you're thinking of letting the world know about your site or
product through banner advertising, consider these important
steps before you start:
1. Plan your campaign
Thoughtful planning is the most important step in successful
advertising in any media. There are several things you must
consider before even creating your banners or choosing where
to advertise:
Is your goal to build brand awareness?
Is your goal to generate leads or clickthroughs?
Who will be most interested in your site or product?
How will you track the effectiveness of your ads?
Once you've answered those questions, you can start planning the
banners you're going to create and exactly what you're going to
do with them.
No matter what your specific goals are, targeting will be a very
important part of any campaign. With the high cost of advertising
with banners, getting them in front of the people you want to see
them becomes incredibly important. This involves identifying the
groups interested in your site or product and getting your ads
on web-sites that cater to that market. For example, a car
dealership would probably be interested in advertising on the
web-site of an auto magazine.
Before you spend any money, spend the time to choose the right
places to advertise. It may seem like the perfect idea to buy
targeted advertising at the first search engine you run into, but
researching into specific sites in your industry can lead to a
buy with results 20 times better. Check out the media kits or
advertising sections of some sites related to your site or
product for information about demographics, previous customers,
and any information they might make public about the
effectiveness
of previous campaigns.
2. Design your banners
To maximize your campaign's effectiveness, you should rotate
between several different banners, possibly as many as 10 or
more. This way, you can appeal to different types of people
within your target group. It also allows you to compensate for
banners which don't perform as well as others, and to decide
which designs or ideas work best for you.
The banner creation process starts in a standard graphics program
such as Adobe PhotoShop or JASC's Paint Shop Pro, which comes
with Animation Shop 3 which will help you later on in the design
process.
Assuming you're creating your own banners and not outsourcing to
a separate company or using a ready-made banner site such as
Readybanners, you'll start by creating several
468x60 images in your favorite graphics program to use as the
frames in your final animated banner, or just one image if you
choose not to animate. Animated banners, even with a simple,
single element of animation tend to draw more clicks than static
ones. Then, use a GIF animation program to create your banners
from the static images. Some include Animation Shop 3 which comes
free with Paint Shop Pro, GIF Movie Gear,
or ULead's GIF Animator.
Here are a few tips to keep in mind for creating effective
banner advertisements:
Color Scheme: Choose only a few colors, maybe 3, to use in
a single banner. Keeping it simple works best, and reduces
image size.
Don't loop your banner animation more than a few times.
Use your best copy when writing the text for your banners.
Choose important features and include words like "free" and
"click here."
Use a simple, readable font.
Look at the banners that catch your attention on the web;
see why you stop and look at theirs.
Optimize your banners' file sizes so they download quickly.
Many graphics programs have functions to do this built in.
3. Launch your campaign and test it
Now that you have several banners created and you've planned
where you're going to advertise and what your goals are, it's
time to launch the campaign; get those banners on the sites! You
should be tracking response with your web logs or other
statistics
so that you know when you are receiving traffic from the sites
you
advertised on. To make this easier, you may want to have your
banners point to a special page you've made on your site just for
those who click on them so that you can easily identify traffic
from your banners by how many times the page is seen.
You should also track which banner is referring which traffic,
either by the referring URLs (Uniform Resource Locators / web addresses) in your web logs or by setting up
different pages for each banner to point to. This way, if certain
banners are working better for you than others, you know to
either
increase their exposure in the current campaign or use them again
in the future.
Hopefully your banners are now increasing your brand name
recognition to your audience on carefully selected sites, or they
are bringing you new traffic and leads you didn't have before!
The author, Dan Grossman, runs Websitegoodies where you can
find over 250 hand-picked resources, articles, and tools! Dan also publishes the free weekly "WebDevPortal" newsletter for
web-site owners! Subscribe today and get articles like this every week.
On-line advertising
If you pay (or want to pay) other sites to run on-line advertising for you, click here. - Internal Link
Affiliate advertising
The effectiveness of affiliate marketing There are armies of webmasters who want to sell your product or service. They do all the work - you make all the money... - Internal Link
Offline promotion
Pressing the editor's button and where you can display your web-site's address where people can see it offline. - Internal Link
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