How Does Banner Advertising Work.

2022-03-02 | 832 Print PDF

What is Banner Advertising?

To simply put banner advertising is the display of ads in graphic or text design messages for the purpose of delivering an advertisement sales pitch to a targetted audience on the web with the intention of generating click-throughs to their respective websites.

A web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web delivered by an ad server. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser... as defined by Wikipedia.

As Wikipedia put it, banner ads come with embedding advertisements properties into web formats via a delivery server on the web. This was clearly the basis of the first world banner that was introduced on October 27 in 1994 by Wired Magazine (Formerly Hotwired), which was a contextual banner ad that said “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will” and the banner sent the user to an AT&T campaign.

So moving forward, we need to grab an understanding of how banner advertising works? The format, the most used sizes, and goals, all will be discussed in the next paragraph below.

How do banner ads work?

You might be wondering what does advertising banner means? Well, banner ads are intended to generate traffic to a website by linking to it. Also, web banners can function as regular, print advertisements: inform, notify about a new product, increase brand awareness, and so on. However, most banners are clickable and their main function is to get clicked on.

We have different formats and sizes of banner advertisements that are used online, but with the most lucrative banner ads being GIF images, due to their flexibility in design. A graphic designer can design a gif banner to display or function as a video SVG file, this takes a lot of design work and time as it involves designing different layers of banner graphics and then laying them on top of each other to play out their action, what you get is an animated gif image which can be used as banner ads.

If you have ever seen a banner display that shows images and text in transitional effects (based on brand design effects and context will vary), this is a banner ad display developed in gif format. It is due to the cost that most SMEs don't patronize this, but still, it is a professional service on its own, not taking anything away from a regular banner design like the examples in the image above, but when it comes to grabbing attention I will advise a gif banner for brands that have a lot to say with a limited budget and ads space.

The next step is to find a website or platform that will enable you to embed your designed banner advert on their platform with a link back to your designated URL (landing page) for promotion, for these, we have numerous channels on the web, with the most famous being Google Ads Network. Since the main goal is to expose your banners to a certain targetted audience on the web, you are poised to do so on highly noted and established platforms, for instance, Google or other banner display serving networks eg Yahoo Native ads display, Facebook Advertising, Youtube advertising, etc this is how to promote banner ads once you have created your suitable choice.

Recommended Read: How To Advertise on Yahoo

Recommended Read: How To Advertise on Facebook For Free

Recommended Read: How to Advertise on YouTube (Tutorial)

You should also factor in the design space or banner size that is being allocated or approved to you on the platform for example Google provides a newer way of auto-generating images sizes to fit their banner size formats which are displayed rotationally on several different websites that allows them to display ads.

While we have other platforms that are quite restricted to the size you can display, for instance on our platform, we only offer three banner advert slots on a blogger published post, they are the footer and header with the sidebar, these three advert spaces can only take any of the banner sizes allocated to them with respect to shapes (so the sizes are defined by the recommended shapes allocated for the ads space.) [Rectangle/Horizontal Banner: Footer/Header Ads] and [Square/Vertical Banner: Side Bar Ads].

Recommended standard banner advert sizes.

How Much Does Banner Advertising Cost

The cost of placing banner advertisements varies per the advertising channel you choose, it all depends on your target audience and your spending limits.

While most advertisers sort out reputable and high-traffic companies like those listed above, others are more concise with influence marketing, this is stern of having a brand ambassador for a product.

To be more practical, the big advertising companies like Google Ads Network display their ads on participant Platforms who end up earning a certain percentage of the revenue they are paid from advertisers, but with influence marketing, the advertisers are dealing directly with the content creators. Banner advertising doesn't need to cost literally the same as offline advertising, but due to the advertising platform model being adopted by these cooperate giants they like to present digital media advertisement on par with offline media advertisement in so doing they rate with TV's impressions and Radio audience.

When it comes to banner advertising cost you as the advertiser should have more say on how your money is spent and to keep things simple, we provide content banner advert placement for our influential content writers. We do this by impression and gauge their performance by occurrence and post engagements, which are presented to the advertisers publicly to ascertain the influencer blogger to work with. We have also provided a minimum cost per impression based on our algorithm of calculating impressions for banner advert views with the selected blogger.

In this case, both content creator and advertiser are in full control of the exchange and deal, the blogger earns 100% of the profit when he or she delivers the expected impression eg Our recommended minimum impression targeted for advertisers banner placement is 200,000 impressions for $50. There is no bid competition to affect your already agreed sum or any other competitor bidding to place their banner ads on the same blogger, your major priority is impressions and not clicks (why the fee is low priced) so having a click-through via the banner ads will be a bonus for a good effective banner ad placement. With this offer, advertisers are spending $0.25 per thousand impressions (CPM), and $0 per click (CPC).

For Google Display Network Benchmarks in Q1 2018, advertisers spent, on average, $2.80 per thousand impressions (CPM), and $0.75 per click (CPC). The average click-through rate (CTR) on the GDN was 0.35%. In comparison, you can see that our banner advertising cost is much more cost-effective and cheaper than other platforms.

Why are Banners Good For Advertising?

Banner advertising is attractive because it can help create brand awareness, generate leads, and re-target an audience (such as giving a visitor a chance to sign up for a newsletter or free trial before they click away). Showcasing your banner advertisement on multiple media outlets gives your brand the strong recognition it deserves as the more impression a visitor sees of your brand or advertisement the more familiarity they begin to build psychologically to your brand without even knowing it.

The same psychology behind impression adverts on TV or billboard can be attained via banner placement, as modern research believes that the average consumer needs to view an ad at least 7-8 times before it's well perceived. This theory was dubbed the 7 times 7 rule, a marketing principle coined from a maxim, developed in the 1930s by the movie industry, who found through research that a potential moviegoer had to see a movie poster at least seven times before they would go to the theatre to see a movie.

So imagine an interaction or an engagement with your brand, in our case scenario a $50 for a 200,000 impression targeted on a blogger's influential content (related to your niche). It is obvious that your brand awareness and visibility with other online media outlets as well will skyrocket your brand popularity, hence, with brand popularity comes targeted traffic which eventually results in sales.

This is to display the cost-effectiveness of banner advertisement and the use of several media outlets, the best offer you will also get is data information about your advert placements, from the country region or location down to the devices, and age brackets, etc.

Conclusion:

Banner ads are very much vital in the digital media advertising industry and are actually projected that display advertising spending will decline search ad spending in the US. Online advertising formats such as banner ads, video, rich media, and sponsorship will account for the largest share of digital ad spending: 47.9%, worth $32.17Billion.

With this great expose, you will consider the graphic design industry growing exponentially, oh well we already have different graphic design and video design tools all competing for their respective attention in this space (all targeting consumers that are keen on advertising).

Banner ads are a big part of the visual world. They work because people react better to visual content or a message that is accompanied by a visual example.

They are visual content and if you’re still not convinced, here is this graphic to prove it:

You can see from the image above that images carries the highest percentage of the critical element followed by Infographic (a long image illustration design) and video elements, while illustrations are considered the most unimportant. So when next you are to design a gif or video (SVG) banner ad, I will suggest you throw out illustrations and focus on benefits or comparison to win your target audience over.

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Author

Olatunji Adetunji

I am a seo web analyst and have a love for anything online marketing. Have been able to perform researches using the built up internet marketing tool; seo web analyst as a case study and will be using the web marketing tool (platform).