Banner Advertising

Banners are the name given to the small graphical adverts on virtually every web page you've ever visited. By clicking on them you'll visit the destination site of the advert.

Banner advertising has become a less successful method of attracting visitors to your web site. It used to have roughly a 1% Click-Thru-Rate, however it now is a lot less.

There are several forms of banner advertising:

• FREE Banner Exchange
• Pay Per Click Schemes

FREE Banner Exchange

You include a few lines of HTML code on your web page which will display someone else's banner when your page is accessed.

This is called an impression. Depending on the company, a number of impressions will entitle you to have your banner displayed on someone else's page. Targeting is used to ensure that your banner ad appears on another web page with suitable relevance to your ad. Hence the term banner exchange.

Pay Per Click Schemes

As the name implies you purchase a number of impressions which will then entitle your banner to be displayed on someone else's web page with relevance to your banner.

More lines of HTML code have to be placed on your web page.

These may be banners as before or can be entry forms for competitions or even search engines to online stores/bookshops.

The main difference is that if the visitor to your web page clicks on this affiliate graphic you will receive payment of some kind if this yields a customer order.

Again the profits made through affiliates will be low unless they're from a web page that gets 1000's of hits a day.

As stated above, the success rate and profits are very low indeed. Cluttering up your web site with other peoples banners can also confuse your visitors.

The idea is for them to focus on your web page's contents - not get distracted by lots of other people's animated banners.

If they do click on them they leave your web page - probably never to return.

Therefore keep your web site free from banners - just like SmallBuys' web site you're in now - not and advert in site.