Banner Advertising

Banner Advertising first appeared on the Internet in 1994, and their use has increased year over year. Banner Advertising is an important part of a well rounded Internet Marketing approach. This form of advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a website design. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the web site of the advertiser. The advertisement is usually constructed from an image or multimedia object often employing animation or sound to maximize presence. Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape (i.e. either wide and short, or tall and narrow) hence the reference to banners. These images are usually placed on web pages that have interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an opinion piece.

Benefits of Banner Advertising

• Banner ads can be as simple as an image that links to your website or as sophisticated as a an animation or video with sound and background music.
• Banner Advertising brings interested potential customers to a targeted page on your website with just one click.
• Banner Advertising is trackable, so you can determine the effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) quickly and easily.
• Well built banner advertisements further brand recognition even if people don't click on your advertisement. Even viewers who don't click through on your banner ad will be exposed to your name, in context with your business message
• Banner advertising is versatile and standardized. Most websites have adopted the standards set by Google in terms of size and shape. This allows a single banner to be used in multiple places without the cost of developing custom sized banners for each individual advertisement.
• Google's standard Banner Advertising sizes (Banner Advertising Examples):
  • 468 x 60 Banner
  • 728 x 90 Leaderboard
  • 250 x 250 Square
  • 200 x 200 Small Square
  • 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
  • 300 x 250 Inline Rectangle
  • 120 x 600 Skyscraper
  • 160 x 600 Wide Wide Skyscrapers
• Acceptable banner advertising file formats for Google and most websites are:
  • .gif
  • .jpg
  • .png
  • .swf

As you can see, web banner advertisements come in many different shapes and sizes. The web banner is displayed when a website design that references the banner is loaded into a web browser. This event is known as an "impression". When the viewer clicks on the banner, the viewer is directed to the website advertised in the banner. This event is known as a "click through". In many cases, banners are delivered by a central ad server.

Banner Advertising Cedar Rapids <top>