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Should you use banners?
WHAT ARE THE BANNERS?
Are graphics or images used for advertising on the Internet,
that you must be quite familiar with if you have been on the
Internet for a while. At they capture your attention with their
blinking animations and bright colors. But after a while, you
start identifying them with ads, and stop paying them atention.
Let me ask you a straight question: Do you click over banners
very often? I bet your answer is NO, because as a matter of fact
the average CTR (clickthrough ratio)
http://www.sharpermedia.com/ for banner ads is nowadays around
0.2%
In other words for every 500 times that a banner is shown, it
gets clicked only once.
With today's CTR being a tenth of what it was in n1997, and
continuing to drop, you must probably have two questions:
Should you forget about banner ads completely? and if not... How
can you get a better clickthrough ratio?
The answer depends on how much profit can you make from each
visitor to your site...
IF YOU CAN CREATE SIGNIFICANT PROFIT FROM EACH VISITOR
Then experimenting with banner ads can produce reasonable results
Start out small. Test the effectiveness of your banners in small
campaigns Then go to big banner advertising.
Banners are a promotion method mostly suitable for online stores
and similar sites with high profit/visitor ratio.
IF YOU CAN'T CREATE SIGNIFICANT PROFIT
If your site is an affiliate program site or you sell
advertising space... Forget banners!.
HOW CAN YOU INCREASE BANNERS CLICK THROUGH RATIO?
Banners aren't about cool design or fancy graphics.
Your banner's purpose is not to look good, but to get people to
click on it, arrive to your site and do what you expect them to
do, like purchase your product or browse through your content.
It doesn't matter if people arrive through ugly or pretty
banners, as long as they arrive
Include a "click here" note in your banners
Why? Because banners that contain the words "click here" get
more clicks than those that don't.
People have been exposed to passive forms of advertising for
decades, and thousands of new users arrive Internet every month.
So if you don't tell them "Click here" they just don't know that
they are supposed to do it in order to go to your web site.
Animation is your friend
Banners that blink or move, catches the eye better than an ad
that is completely static.
But be careful because an over-use of animation will increase
the file size of banners, and make them take a longer time to
load, increaseing the chance that the visitor has already
scrolled past your banner, before it even appears on the screen.
Use large text that clearly spells what you are about
Using pictures or yourr company logo is not always a bad idea,
but you should make sure that there's enough room left for text.
Use a large font size
You'll have to get noticed and small text just doesn't stand out
the way bigger text does.
Get right to the point and be brief
Don't try to explain in detail what your site is about, you
should explain it at your site. You must use banners just to get
the click to your site.
Outline the benefits
To get the user's click you must give him a good reason to visit
your site. Words such as "free" and "sweepstakes" or a beautiful
lady and a hint of sex usually perform extremely well in terms
of clickthroughs.
But your banners must talk about what you really offer. If
there's nothing free at your site, you can't use the word free
in your banner, or you'll get the wrong audience.
So be careful with the tricks,. they can be very useful, and can
cause problems as well.
Better small
The faster your banner loads, the more time it has to attract a
response. So you should always remember to optimize your banners
for size at: http://www.gifwizard.com /pn=64579 reducing the
number of bytes your banner takes is CRITICAL to increasing it's
CTR. Ideally, your banner should be 6000 bytes or less:
It is often a good idea to remove excess graphics or heavy
animation.
I recommend OptiView at: http://www.gifwizard.com /pn=64579 as
the best online tool you can use to reduce the size (in bytes)
of your banners (and other graphics). It will compress your
graphics up to 90%.
Trick banners
Banners like the following, pull quite a lot better than the
standard ones.
The reason is that this kind of banners doesn't really look like
banners, and many people just think that they are part of the
navigation system of the site and click it.
Trick banners receive a very high clickthrough ratio when
compared to normal banner ads, but their downside is that the
traffic they bring can be of lower value, because visitors are
tricked into coming to your site.
Targeting pays off
Try to place your banners on places that attract the type of
people who might be interested about your site.
BANNERS STANDARD SIZES SIZE TYPE 468 x 60 Full Banner 234 x 60
Half Banner 392 x 72 Full Banners with vertical navigation 120 X
240 Vertical Banner 125 x125 Square Button 120 x 90 Button # 1
120 x 60 Button # 2 88 x 31 Micro Button
WHAT ABOUT BANNERS EXCHANGE?
If you can't afford it or just don't like the idea of paying so
much for an advertising campaign, you can opt for a banners
exchange program, where you display banners on your pages for
free and in return, other members of the program show your
banner ad on their sites.
This sounds like a good idea, because it doesn't cost anything.
But is it?
For starters, several banner exchanges have a 2:1 ratio
So for every 2 banners shown on your site, your banner gets
shown once on other sites, and there are programs with a 3:2
ratio
Many exchange programs don't offer targeting
So your banners will end being displayed on sites that have very
little in common with your site and that leads to a low CTR for
your banners.
Lets make some numbers
You join a 2:1 banners exchange program
You get 10000 pageviews a day, and each one of them show other
people's banner
You earn 5000 impressions a day. Your banner is shown in 5000
places
As you have created some killer banners, you beat the industry
average clickthrough rate of 0.2% and your banner receives a 1%
Click Through Rate, so 50 visitors come to your site.
So you exchanged 10000 hardly earned visitors for a whopping 50
visitors to your site!
My advice: Forget about banners exchange programs. Only display
a banner ad on your pages, if they pay you for doing it. And
even though, make sure you earn more than you spent to bring the
visitor into your web site..
Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi
About the author:
Dr. Roberto Bonomi is a successful e-book writer that shares his
home business experience at: http://www.easy-home-bus
iness.com If you already have, or are looking for an
Internet Home Business, you can't miss the free knowledge that
you'll receive at his site.
Written by: Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi
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