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Attracting traffic with banner ads
By Nowshade Kabir
Contact Nowshade Kabir

Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing business
on the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day brick
and mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more dramatic
and may have greater impact than in a conventional business.
Success in this climate can only come from quick response to the
changes. Look at web advertisement! Just in a few short years,
we have seen rise and fall of banner advertisement, email
marketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number of other marketing
tools.

Consider banner advertisement. In the beginning of Internet era,
banner advertisement was one of the primer methods of online
marketing. There were not many quality sites in those days. In
search of good feature and content filled websites visitors
were clicking through banners aggressively. Today, things are
totally different! Over using of banners on the web pages
forced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more.
Visitors tend to avoid clicking through the banners unless
there is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that mean
the banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon!

Although, banner click through rate is quite low in comparison
to what it used to be, depending on your objectives banner
advertisement can still be very effective. Banner ads are
used today, either for creating brand recognition or for
bringing in more traffic to the website and consequently
generating more sales.

Brand recognition

As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies place
banners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently posted
on high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of your
products or services popular to certain niche market, you
should find websites catering this particular audience and
post banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whether
they click on it or not � same like traditional bill boards
and TV advertisements � it helps you building consciousness
to your brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be as
effective as television advertising as far as brand
recognition is concerned. A survey was conducted among
members of American Online who saw an ad of a product
as a banner on the website and on TV commercial. The
result indicated that 40 percent of the audience remembers
the static banners and 41 percent remembers the TV
commercial at the time of the poll conducted a few days
later.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brand
recognition effect from online ad campaign in comparison
to traditional forms of advertisements for around 60
percent less cost. However, same like offline ads, in
order to create a sustainable brand recognition, your
online advertisement campaign also needs to run for a
prolong period of time.

Generating traffic

Banner ads could be a good source of high quality traffic
for your website if you manage your banner ad campaign
wisely. If your main purpose of the campaign is to generate
more sales by attracting traffic - which is any way should
be the main goal of any e-commerce site � you have to select
sites to post banners where you target audience frequently
visit. Pay per click search engines like Overture or Google
Adwords are good options for your textual banner ads. Since
the visitors are already looking for a website like yours
by searching for the keyword that you have selected to
place your ad, you get highly targeted traffic from this.

There are no fixed rules of effective banner ads campaign.
You have to learn the program works best for you by trial
and error. The principal idea behind any advertisement is
to grab viewers� attention, ignite their curiosity and
motivate them to act. For banner ads it is no different!

The following tips should help you getting better result
from your banner advertisement campaign:

1. Choose an attention grabbing content. Space is so
limited in a banner � same like newspaper headlines � you
have to come up with something that really gets viewer�s
attention. Since you have to do it in one or two sentences,
try using something funny, outrageous but intriguing.
You can also use pictures, which deliver similar effect.

2. Call to an action. Many people like to be guided. Tell
them what to do such as �Click here� or �Go to the website�.

3. Focus on one offer. Your banner ad should carry one
single message. By including several offers in one ad,
chances are you will confuse viewers rather than intrigue.

4. Make it readable. Even a greatly designed banner will
fail to motivate a viewer if the text on it is not readable.

5. Avoid information overload. Too many pictures, colors
and texts make banners look clumsy. Viewers tend to ignore
this type of banners. Animated banners should have less than
four frames.

6. Don�t use heavy banners. Make sure that your banner file
size is less than 5K. Bigger files take longer time to load.

7. Test your banners before publishing. Check how your
banners will look with different browsers. Verify that the
banner link URL is correct and linked to the right page on
your website. Whenever, you make changes to your website,
make sure to double check your banner ads.

Recent practice shows that a banner, which looks like a text
has 4 times more click through rate than a conventional banner.
So use text banners to increase efficiency of your banner
ad program.

Since advertisement is the main source of income for many
websites banner ads are here to stay. Although, there is no
doubt that their look and use will constantly be evolved.

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