Banner Advertising

Once your small business is up and running and you've set up a web site, it is very tempting to get into banner advertising, either by joining a free exchange or by paying for ads to run on other sites. You may even be tempted to join up with one of the sites that pay you for anyone clicking a banner on your site - earn a bit of money on the side. Unfortunately there are still many problems with this way of advertising and comparatively few benefits.

As a consultant, I have to know about these things so I joined a number of these services. The free exchanges didn't generate any noticeable increase in hits and I found the presence of the banners on the site distracting. I joined a service which promised to pay half a cent per click-through but I deactivated their banner when I found that they had only three ads to display. The industry is suffering from the presence of a lot of disreputable players.

Another problem with banner ads is targeting. You can target print ads geographically by advertising locally and by advertising in a publication which is read by your target market. You can then segment the market by making the ad appeal to your potential customers. You can't do that with banner ads which are basically seen by anyone. Even with a high click-through rate, you're likely to be getting a lot of people who won't be able to buy your product or who thought it was something completely different. The cleverest banner I've seen was one showing a scroll bar along the bottom and a message which went off the right side of the banner. I don't normally click banners but I clicked the scroll bar to see the rest of the message and found myself on the advertiser's page. I found this really irritating and instantly clicked the Back button. High click-through rate - low sales.

On his site dedicated to banner advertising, Mark Welch discusses these and other issues and gives you all the information you need to get into banners in a big way or to find reasons to avoid them altogether.

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