4 Things You Probably Didnt Know About Banner Advertising
| Category: Banner Advertising | Date: 2001-12-21 |
POINT 1: Banner Advertising Works
Most ultra-small web business owners (3 employees or less) believe that banner advertising is too expensive to use as a traffic generator, and is primarily purchased by large corporations that are into "branding" and have more money than common sense.
But there is a very small group of people who run ultra-small businesses that know the secrets of making banner advertising profitable.
One of my business partners pays over $40,000 per year to buy banner advertising, which has led to over $1.2 million in product sales over the last two and a half years. We do it because it works for us.
As an example, $60,000 spent on banner ads to promote our websites would represent about 6,000,000 times our banners show up on highly targetted websites (we pay about one penny for each "banner impression"). If our banners average a 1% CTR (Click Through Rate), that means 60,000 highly qualified and motivated visitors to our web site. Thats $1 per visitor. A 3% CTR would bring us 180,000 visitors (which would be 33 cents per qualified visitor), and so on.
The reason banner ads dont work for most small businesses that are focussed on making immediate sales, is because their click rates are far below 1% - 3%, so their cost per visitor is way too high ($5, $20, even $50 ... or higher!) to make a profit even with a reasonably good product and sales process. The sales process (what you do AFTER somebody finds your website) is outside the scope of this article.
Whats My Secret?
I make banners that dont look like ads. They disappear into the sites theyre on and when people click on them, they sometimes dont even realize theyre clicking on an ad. After all, most web surfers ignore obvious ads on websites.
I also design my banner ads to make a promise, and deliver on that promise, so that when people click on them and end up at my website, they are not upset!
Banner ads that look like radio buttons, checkboxes, hypertext links, dropdown menus, "Click Here" buttons and other "natural" parts of websites, get much better click rates than animation, flash, graphics and so on, as a general rule. What really does the selling is the WORDS that appear in and around these buttons, boxes and drop down menus.
A lot of people design banners that have these elements, but they sabotage themselves by throwing in an orange background, a border, some animation, or a photo, and boom - now the people visiting the website automatically look away because its obviously AN AD!
POINT 2: Banners are great for niche targetting
As each year goes by, more and more niche markets can be reached on the Internet. More traffic is available, and you can target your banners at specific markets, countries, states, demographics, and in some cases you can even target specific pages within specific websites.
I look for $10 CPM deals ($10 cost per 1000 "impressions" of my ads.) Advertising on networks which promised to deliver me targetted traffic used to be profitable for me. It no longer is.
I dont pay the ridiculous $50 to $70 CPM ad rates that some websites, especially search engines, are asking.
POINT 3: Banner Advertising Is Highly Scalable
With banner ads, once you have a favorable cost-per-visitor number (which is determined by what you pay for the advertising and how good your click rate is), you can simply buy as much traffic as you want to.
POINT 4: Banner Ads Are For "The Little Guy" Too
Banner advertising isnt just for big business. Sure, its not free - youll need $500 to $1000 minimum to get started - but even a very small business can use banner advertising. Our initial test in early 1998 was for $50 on LinkExchange.
Start off testing at least 5 or 10 banners against each other. This way you find out what your market responds to.
Remember my own experience - under $160,000 spent on banner advertising, resulting in over $1 million in sales. So dont let anybody tell you "banner advertising doesnt work"!
About the Author
Scott Coverts new book "The Banner Advertising Traffic Machine" is available at banneradmagic.com and Scott is also available for private one-on-one banner advertising consultation and complete design services. Phone 1-705-749-2225
:To contact see details below.
scott@banneradmagic.com
http://www.banneradmagic.com/aismedia.htm
Most ultra-small web business owners (3 employees or less) believe that banner advertising is too expensive to use as a traffic generator, and is primarily purchased by large corporations that are into "branding" and have more money than common sense.
But there is a very small group of people who run ultra-small businesses that know the secrets of making banner advertising profitable.
One of my business partners pays over $40,000 per year to buy banner advertising, which has led to over $1.2 million in product sales over the last two and a half years. We do it because it works for us.
As an example, $60,000 spent on banner ads to promote our websites would represent about 6,000,000 times our banners show up on highly targetted websites (we pay about one penny for each "banner impression"). If our banners average a 1% CTR (Click Through Rate), that means 60,000 highly qualified and motivated visitors to our web site. Thats $1 per visitor. A 3% CTR would bring us 180,000 visitors (which would be 33 cents per qualified visitor), and so on.
The reason banner ads dont work for most small businesses that are focussed on making immediate sales, is because their click rates are far below 1% - 3%, so their cost per visitor is way too high ($5, $20, even $50 ... or higher!) to make a profit even with a reasonably good product and sales process. The sales process (what you do AFTER somebody finds your website) is outside the scope of this article.
Whats My Secret?
I make banners that dont look like ads. They disappear into the sites theyre on and when people click on them, they sometimes dont even realize theyre clicking on an ad. After all, most web surfers ignore obvious ads on websites.
I also design my banner ads to make a promise, and deliver on that promise, so that when people click on them and end up at my website, they are not upset!
Banner ads that look like radio buttons, checkboxes, hypertext links, dropdown menus, "Click Here" buttons and other "natural" parts of websites, get much better click rates than animation, flash, graphics and so on, as a general rule. What really does the selling is the WORDS that appear in and around these buttons, boxes and drop down menus.
A lot of people design banners that have these elements, but they sabotage themselves by throwing in an orange background, a border, some animation, or a photo, and boom - now the people visiting the website automatically look away because its obviously AN AD!
POINT 2: Banners are great for niche targetting
As each year goes by, more and more niche markets can be reached on the Internet. More traffic is available, and you can target your banners at specific markets, countries, states, demographics, and in some cases you can even target specific pages within specific websites.
I look for $10 CPM deals ($10 cost per 1000 "impressions" of my ads.) Advertising on networks which promised to deliver me targetted traffic used to be profitable for me. It no longer is.
I dont pay the ridiculous $50 to $70 CPM ad rates that some websites, especially search engines, are asking.
POINT 3: Banner Advertising Is Highly Scalable
With banner ads, once you have a favorable cost-per-visitor number (which is determined by what you pay for the advertising and how good your click rate is), you can simply buy as much traffic as you want to.
POINT 4: Banner Ads Are For "The Little Guy" Too
Banner advertising isnt just for big business. Sure, its not free - youll need $500 to $1000 minimum to get started - but even a very small business can use banner advertising. Our initial test in early 1998 was for $50 on LinkExchange.
Start off testing at least 5 or 10 banners against each other. This way you find out what your market responds to.
Remember my own experience - under $160,000 spent on banner advertising, resulting in over $1 million in sales. So dont let anybody tell you "banner advertising doesnt work"!
About the Author
Scott Coverts new book "The Banner Advertising Traffic Machine" is available at banneradmagic.com and Scott is also available for private one-on-one banner advertising consultation and complete design services. Phone 1-705-749-2225
:To contact see details below.
scott@banneradmagic.com
http://www.banneradmagic.com/aismedia.htm
Copyright © 2005-2006 Powered by Custom PHP Programming