subject: How and Why to Buy Banner Ad Spots that Grow Your Business [print this page] How and Why to Buy Banner Ad Spots that Grow Your Business
The most popular ad unit on the internet is the banner ad. It has many sizes and creative content ranging from an image and short text to quite complicated displays. In fact, the IAB (International Advertising Bureau) reports that banner ad spots account for over 50% of all internet advertising in the USA.
Banner ads should be a key part of any internet marketing effort to grow your business. However, many small businesses fear that banner ad spots are too expensive or appear too complicated and these businesses initially utilize the least expensive advertising available such as keyword placements on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and similar providers.
Eventually, after some success with these "text" approaches and evidence of their site's good conversion rate and product or service acceptance, the business decides to increase their customer base. For this growth to occur it is necessary to upgrade their advertising efforts, including adding banner ad spots.
When buying banner ad spots, a good start is targeting sites that offer similar or complementary products, or highly targeted traffic. Including, perhaps especially, websites where competitors' ads appear. In addition, some of these sites may be willing to exchange links, particularly if the advertiser can show high traffic on their website. If not though a link exchange may require some initial investment but keep in mind that most sites are always looking for ways to increase their own traffic at no expense. Other possible choices are newsletters that feature similar or complimentary products or services.
The success or failure of banner ad spots will depend entirely on the banner ad content and placement. A productive campaign would use multiple sites and banners.
A quicker path to accomplish increased traffic is placement of banner ads on CPA Networks. Connecting publishers with advertisers, these ad networks provide banner ad spots on thousands of affiliate sites on a straight commission basis using CPA (cost per action) to reflect the number new visitor to the advertisers website.
RON (Run of Network) traffic is the cheapest mode and provides the most volume because ads run on all affiliates. Ideally, an advertiser should arrange multiple IOs (Insertion Order) with different banners and a 24-hour out clause to get rid of the losers and ramp up winners.
Perhaps the best value in using ad networks for your banner spots is the ability to design ad campaigns. This will not only gain traffic but optimize banner content and even obtain demographic data with the use of an ad network's more expensive targeted "channels." Choose from channels like parenting, cooking, gardening, beauty, the elderly, men, women, health, and many more.
Finally, with this wealth of information, buying banner ad spots on individual websites with targeted traffic that caters to the business' most likely potential customers can maximize well eCPM beyond that obtained from an ad network alone.
Marketing online with banner ads to grow your business is a step all businesses go through. Maintaining your public profile requires some constant attention, and expanding your customer base means you have to look for new web sites that offer banner marketing.
To find good sites like this can be hard. When they're starting out, advertising can be cheap, but the quality of customers can be unknown. By the time there is more customer information the price to advertise will have risen dramatically.
Your best bet is to look for fast growing sites that look professional, rank well with Alexa and whose rankings are constantly climbing towards the number one spot.
Companies like these who are growing and looking for new advertisers will often offer long term contracts at cheap rates. This gives you incentive to sign up with them and to have a huge advantage later on when the customer base has grown. Additionally by then the doors will be closed to your competitors, who will all be wondering how you can afford to advertise on such a prestigious site.
Times of recession are excellent to build foundations for the future. Prices on nearly everything are lower, and opportunities better.
