Making Money From Your Website: Are Banner Ads for You?

When you have a website, you hope that people will flock to your site to buy your product or service. To facilitate this, you aim to develop an attractive, easy-to-navigate website that will be a useful marketing tool for you. Wouldn't you like to make money from your website itself, even as it was helping you cultivate sales of your product or service?

Since the 1980's, when Prodigy first tried online advertising to promote Sears and other companies, opening a website to outside advertising has been a growing way to turn website space into revenue. By the early 90's, the ads were clickable banners that ultimately became traceable for advertisers. In the early years, the advertiser paid the website owner based on impressions, but later this model was changed to ad response. Currently, Yahoo and Google AdWords have perfected tracking ad response and related it to keywords.

The principle is that you can sell banner ads on your site for a fee, which you set based on how much traffic your site commands. This might be the $5-10 range per thousand page views (CPM), but increases if your site has a highly targeted audience. If you generate 20,000 page views per month at $5 CPM, you might make $100, while for 1 million views, you would receive $5,000. According to Dr. Ralph Wilson writing for Web Marketing Today, banner advertising works best on sites set up to deliver a lot of information, such as news sites, hobby or industry-related sites, directories, download sites, databases, or movie listing sites. These sites tend to pull a lot of traffic, which makes them interesting to buyers.

As a website owner, banner advertising is not just a cash cow that grazes on your site. You have to feed and clean up for the cow. Assuming your site generates enough traffic to make banner ads pay off, you need to either work with a banner advertising agency or buy the appropriate software to manage the ads. You need to capture accurate statistics on the number and type of visitors to your site so that advertisers can judge if your site is a good match for their ad dollars. Unless you are working with an agency who does this for you, you will need to aggressively promote your site space and pull in advertisers who are a good fit for you. In short, you need to devote a combination of time and money to develop banner advertising as a steady revenue stream. You have to ask yourself if the return will be great enough to justify the costs involved in setting up and maintaining viable banner ad sales program.

As a website owner, the fundamental question to consider before selling space on your site is whether it will dilute your message. Will visitors click on the ad and never come back to your site? Is it worth earning a few dollars if potential customers drift away from you site, where you are selling a $100 product, and never come back? Considering that the "click through rate," which measures how many customers click on the ad, averages only 1-2%, this is a small risk, but flashing banner ads can be distracting. If you think about the flack caused in recent years when doctors and lawyers have resorted to consumer advertising, you might also consider if banner ads are in line with your general image.

If you have a site which generates sufficient traffic to make banner advertising successful, you might consider selling space. Like any other business decision, you must carefully consider whether setting your website up to make money will be cost-effective and in line with your vision of how you want to promote your company.

Using Flash Banner Advertisements for Your Online Business

When it comes to having a business on the Internet, you will have to take the time to make sure that you know what the best ways to advertise are. There are numerous different ways that you can go about advertising online, however, you should keep in mind that not all of them work as you would hope. For example, most businesses no longer use pop up advertisements because there have been many blockers that have been made to combat this form of advertising. You should consider using banners as a way to advertise for your business.

It is essential that you take the time to set up your banner correctly in the beginning before you even start searching for a website to use it on. You should make sure that your flash banner is interesting enough to keep the attention of individuals; however, you will want to keep it simple as well. You should make sure that your flash banner has a headline that will make people want to know more. If you take the time to include graphics, you will not have to worry about catching possible visitors' attention.

Once you have attracted attention, then you will have to make sure that you are able to keep it. There are a couple of ways that people decide to go about this. Two of the main ways that people use flash banner advertisements is by first incorporating a rotator into the banner. This will allow you to use graphics that will change at even intervals. You can also use either a game or a video because this is a great way for you to advertise with a banner advertisement. You should remember that you would want to do something that will make people want to know more.

Once you have your banner advertisement set up the way that you would like, you will then have to make a decision on which sites you will like to incorporate your banner onto. Before you make a final decision, you should make sure that you take the time to speak to the webmaster to find out how much you will have to pay him or her to be able to place your flash banner on their site. If you do not have the amount of money that you will need to pay to have your banner placed on another site, you can still place it on certain sites such as social networking and article submission sites.

Where Are the Best Placements for Banner Ads?

An important thing to consider when thinking about how best to optimize advertising on your website is the best placements for banner ads. Where you place, how you position banner ads and the content of these ads can have a big impact on how many people look at your ads and click on them. You have to put yourself in the position of the user of the traffic you are targeting. In order to increase your CTR (Click-Through Rates), it is important to consider these suggestions.

The first thing one must consider is ad placement and positioning. Where you place the ads is crucial to engaging users and achieving higher CTR's. Ads that are placed close to content tend to be more successful than ads that are placed farther away from the content of the page, especially on the periphery. Heat maps of websites are good evidence of this. Ads that are placed above the fold are usually much more successful than those that are placed below the fold. Essentially, what is initially viewable when the page loads, without having to scroll down gets a lot more of the user's attention.

You must also think about the amount of ads on your website. Now, this is an avenue where you can go seriously overboard. A website with too many ads is off putting for users and for potential advertisers. Not many users will be interested in low content websites and find the large amount of ads distracting. Also, advertisers may not like competing with a massive amount of other ads.

Another thing that's important is to know your user, know what target you want to traffic. This is where doing research is absolutely essential. Decide who exactly you want to target and research that demographic. Advertising what suits their lifestyle; basically what ads would interest them is an important way to optimize your banner ads.

Ads that are animated can be useful for grabbing a user's attention; however, it is important not to go crazy. Animated ads with automatic sound can come off as startling and irritating. If an ad does have sound, it is best to make it optional as to not alienate potential customers. You don't want your website to be considered the website with the annoying ads. Also, a powerful heading for your banner ads can be a useful way for grabbing a user's attention and encouraging them to revisit your website. Also, interesting illustrations can grab a user's attention and an incentive for more information can make the user want to explore the offer further.

It is also important to consider the size of your banner ads. Larger sizes such as leaderboards (720x90) have been found to perform better since they tend to get prominent placement (header of the website) and stand more since they are larger. Other sizes that also tend to perform better are rectangles (300x250). Banner ads that are 486x60 tend to produce the worst results which may be because they are smaller than other ads and therefore are less noticeable and tend to be buried in content or since this size is the oldest size, users have gotten used to it and now ignore ads like these.

When thinking about the best placements and positioning for your banner ads there are many things to consider. Some essential things to consider include; ads placed above the fold and near content tend to be more successful. Also, one must know what target you want to traffic and also think about content of the banner ads and what will grab the user's attention. Size of the banner ads also plays an important role as larger banner ads tend to perform much better than the smaller sizes. If you would like to learn how Monetize More could find the most optimal AdSense creative combination for you site, contact us at: http://www.monetizemore.com/contactus.

General Points of Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is one of the oldest forms of Internet advertising. The advantages of this method of advertising for the site were most evident in the early era of Internet advertising. The first banner ad campaigns were quite primitive - simple manual exchange of non-standardized advertising images with links between webmasters.

After some time, there have formed standard sizes for banners:

468 x 60 - big stretch, it is one of the oldest and most popular types of banners. These banners are supported by all banner exchange networks. The largest and most visible type of banner, allowing not only to attract attention and interest to the user, but also to convey sufficient information about the advertised site.

100 x 100 - "square banner." Became popular as an option for placing a banner in the website navigation bars, but eventually got the status of the standard. Not supported by all banner exchange networks, but is quite popular with manual banner exchange.

88 x 31 - "button" - this banner exchange is very limited in supported exchange networks, particularly by large, but has become almost standard "de facto" in the exchange of banners and links.

120 x 60 - "small banner" - not available to all banner exchange networks, but they are quite common in the direct sale of advertising space on websites.

234 x 60 - "half a large stretching." Situation is similar to the banner 120 by 60.

"The eye" is the banner of arbitrary shape with navigation elements.

These standards remain relevant today. With this standardization occurred the opportunity to build the most effective banner exchange network. Banner exchange networks have emerged as a logical consequence of the desire to simplify the webmaster banner exchange to "cross" advertise their resources. As a result, there has been created several mechanisms for the exchange standard of banners, acting on a "show other people's banners on your site and we will show on your other sites." Thus the profit banner networks formed and are composed of a certain percentage of impressions (usually from 10 to 30), which are allocated to the impressions of commercial (paid) banners, raised a banner network.

The first banner ads did not have any opportunities to target - show "all and for all." However, in view of the unemployment market efficiency such advertising was high enough. The main indicator of the effectiveness of banner - CTR (ratio of impressions to clicks the user) was from 2 to 10 or even more percent. For comparison - in the current banner networks is considered a good indicator of CTR at 1 percent. Naturally, together with the growth of the market changed and banner ads, adapting to the requirements of advertising specialists. Today's networks have extensive opportunities to target, often narrow specialization, as well as highly customizable displays. There is an opportunity to choose not only the desired theme sites, where you would like to see your banner, but their geography, display time, the type of operating system user, etc. All this has allowed banner networks to remain competitive enough.

Nevertheless, many experts prefer to manually ad paid banner placement on the resources that are considered promising in terms of getting targeted traffic. This method has both advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage - theoretically much greater efficiency than in the case of banner exchange networks and there is no need to allocate site locations

If in the case of banner exchange costs are practically zero (excluding the cost of manufacture of the banner) in the case of purchase displays in the network are measured in units of dollars per 1,000 impressions, in case of direct purchase banner space for the costs can be ten times more and not be measured in clicks or shows, and in time intervals. For example, $ 30 per day or $ 200 a month. However it is possible to return the money at the apparent failure of the campaign is not possible.

On the other hand, manual tracking and placement of banners can provide a higher CTR, but some sites allow and pay "per click", whereby you only pay for visitors. You can call this method of advertising the most effective of all methods of banner advertising. True, it requires an order of magnitude larger budget than the use of banner exchange networks and redemption shows through them.