In my personal opinion, online banner advertising is one of the most effective pay-for-placement marketing mediums you can use when you’re promoting your small business on a local level. The small business world seriously needs to wake up to the power of the web! If you know of any good local websites that are pulling in a large amount of targeted traffic, you need to contact them immediately and request a media kit that explains how their advertising platform operates.
An advertiser-friendly website should allow you to display an unlimited amount of banners, using all of their available banner sizes, and they should be about 50-75% less expensive than local print mediums. Does that sound too good to be true? … Well believe it, cause it is!
The biggest question a business owner always has towards their advertising is… “How well is my campaign performing?” The print, television, and radio mediums can’t tell ya – But the online medium sure can! A quality website should be able to give you EXACT stats on how well your campaign is performing – They can actually tell you how many times an ad was clicked, which is a HUGE indicator of your campaign’s effectiveness. So speak up and ask for those stats!
But you know what?
… Even though your banner’s click-thru rate is a good indicator of effectiveness, your campaign is actually performing better than those stats indicate! The New York Times explains how this is possible…
“About a third of consumers sometimes click on banner advertisements on the Web. But twice as many consumers sometimes respond to such ads indirectly, avoiding clicking on them but later visiting the Web sites advertised, according to a survey by DoubleClick, an online marketing-software company. 6,121 adults were surveyed in July via an online panel adjusted to reflect the Internet-using population.
The finding suggests that consumers prefer to reach sites on their own, rather than by linking through advertisements. “People are engaged in the content they’re looking at the time that they’re exposed to the ad, and they don’t want to navigate off the page,†said Rick Bruner, DoubleClick’s director of research.
Marketers have been slow to come to that realization, and many still pay ad publishers only when an ad is clicked on. But an increasing number pay a fee for every thousand consumers who see the ad  effectively using Internet ads to generate awareness, as they would newspaper or television ads. That is often the compensation scheme behind elaborate, interactive ads like those for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest†last summer. ALEX MINDLIN”
Hey bizMAVERICKS! Have you found any websites that have killer advertising programs? If so, what was your experience like? Let us know in the comments section below!
Wishing you continued success…
bizMAVERICK-
Brad Williamson
Interesting stats Brad…
I’m actually a huge fan of SEM. I was reading another article on the results of an eye-tracking study performed on search engines and it showed that when people are doing research, they only click on the organic results. Meanwhile people who search with the intention of making a purchase, click on sponsored results around 40 percent (?) of the time!
Now a days it is better to use social medias for advertising as it has more popularity .