We’ve all seen thousands of banner adverts on the Internet but can you remember the last one? Maybe, you can remember your favorite one that had a golf game in it but do you remember what brand it was for? Banner advertising is one of the earliest forms of advertising on the Internet, so called because the adverts typically represented graphical banners across the page.
The sizes were defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) to commoditize the online advertising industry, taking adverts into a fixed set of sizes and styles similar to the 15 and 30 second ad slots on TV or 48 sheet posters. This makes it easier for sites to sell advertising and for advertisers to book using a clear set of sizes. Cost per Thousand impressions (CPM) is the normal unit of sales and is a cost for a thousand of the banner impressions to appear on a site, normally restricted to one per page. A few problems lay with the online formats, namely:
- The various computer screen sizes and resolutions people use make one size banner appear at various different sizes and take up a different proportion of the screen for people with different screen resolutions. You can’t really imagine an advertiser in magazine being too happy about his full page advert appearing at smaller sizes in some magazines.
- The per impression billing model implies that an impression is where one person had seen that banner, where in reality it is quite possible for that banner to appear off the screen for some users because of screen resolution or browser window size.
- A longer term problem was the increased occurrence of banners which causes banner blindness where your brain just switches off to a particular size of picture because it knows it is an advert.
As online advertising has evolved so have the formats, we now have newer Rich Media formats so called because they offer a richer user experience. These formats are similar to TV adverts and often have an interactive element that lets users interact with the advert. This could be as simple as opening a box to reveal a product or more complicated implementations where you can check if nights are available directly on the banner. Forrester research predicts that Rich Media will start to take precedence over search in 2007. These Rich Media banners are the other end of the online marketing spectrum from the simple pay per click text adverts and offer an ability to send a compelling message and allow a level of interaction that just wasn’t available in any previous medium. The real key is to maximize on the potential to create truly branded experiences that leave the customer with a positive feeling.
Rich Media and Banner Formats
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There are a number of popular formats that companies are working with:
- Video banners - more and more people have broadband and running videos within banners is great for running movie trailers or re-using TV advertising.
- Overlays - running transparently on the top of content pages.
- Expandables - banner which expands out when the user brings their mouse cursor over it.
- Interstitials - full page advertising that displays before the content of a page loads.
- Transaction banners - allowing full booking, flight check, ecommerce transactions straight from the banner.
- Dynamically generated - where the banner loads frequently changing data like interest rates for a bank or betting odds.
- Interactive - allowing interaction with the advert to experience the brand.
Interaction
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The key advantage of online is the ability to interact with a campaign. A customer can not only see a campaign for a product but can also experience the product or brand values through interaction. This could take the form of dragging around an object, peeling or popping open a box to reveal a product to more complex actions that work as simple games. Marketing through experience is particularly valuable as it increases brand recall and can have a positive impact on the perception of a brand. Interaction has been so successful that many outdoor campaigns are starting to take this up with posters that contain touch-sensitive video screens.
Targeting
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Successful targeting of campaigns can have exceptional results. For example, an airline banner on a travel destination site. The idea is to match the audience for your offering with the audience of the site running your campaign. This can be further advanced with detailed data that site owners have that lets them match campaigns to specific users. Also, the impact of Rich Media campaigns is ideal for behavioral targeting where a particular campaign is displayed based on specific triggers like a consumer clicking a combination of links.
Shows Per Session
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Due to the higher impact of Rich Media campaigns you should make sure that a user does not get overwhelmed with your advert as a result, you probably want to restrict impressions to once per site visit.
Performance Measurement
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Online marketing has the advantage that it can be measured in considerably more detail than traditional kinds of marketing. In particular, the level of clicks, interactions, or even the people that may have seen a campaign and then respond later. Three of the primary measurements are:
- Post click event - This counts the people that click a banner and then those that either book, sign-up or buy from a site.
- Post interaction event - This counts the number of people that interact with a banner but don’t necessarily click-through to the site and later conduct a booking, sign-up or buy from the site. This is a good metric but doesn’t consider that a user could have interacted with a banner by accident to reach the close button.
- Post impression event - This counts the number of people that see a banner and then visit the site later and conduct a booking, sign up or buy from the site. The main issue with this is that someone who sees a banner isn’t necessarily influenced by the banner. This is particularly the case when it is applied to low impact 468 banners but less so to higher impact full page overlays.
The tools required to measure these figures often rely on technology like cookies, which some people disable and delete or JavaScript, which some people disable. Therefore, these metrics can only be best guesses and allowances need to made for measurement inaccuracy. It is important to have a single analytics system to ensure that impressions and revenue are not counted twice allocated across multiple sources.
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