Banner Advertisements.

Advertising with “banners” on websites was all the rage in the late 1990s and was considered by many as the best way to reach potential customers online. Some of the enthusiasm about banner advertisements has faded, but pitching products with banner ads has endured.

Banners ads, even elaborate ones with graphics and movement, are basically simple HTML files inserted as a rectangular graphical form into a web page, and many are easy to create inexpensively. If web page visitors are interested, they will click the ad, which acts as a hyperlink to the e-commerce website that the advertiser wants them to visit.

There are typically eight sizes of banner ads offered, usually as horizontal rectangles although vertical ads and squares are also popular. The size of the ad and its complexity (and sometimes its memory size) helps determine its cost, much like an advertisement placed in a newspaper or magazine.

Ads can be as simple as just text, although that's not probably the best option in the multimedia world of today's Web. Usually, text is accompanied by artwork or a graphic of some kind, and creating full-motion ads with video and even audio are increasingly popular. More complex ads will require experienced professional designers skilled at making the banners attractive while conforming to the technical specifications of the website on which the retailer is advertising.

An important consideration when buying banner advertising is being able to measure its effectiveness. One measurement offered by advertisers is “click-through,” which is the percentage of Internet users visiting a web page who click on the ad. Even small click-through rates of 1 or 2 percent are considered effective.

Another measure is the number of “impressions” or “page views” an ad makes. This is simply the number of times a web page containing the ad was viewed, regardless of whether the visitor clicked the ad or not. This is roughly analogous to selling a radio ad based upon the number of listeners, without any real idea if they did or didn't pay attention to it.

Retailers will want to gauge the effectiveness of their banner ads by determining their sales achieved from banner advertising compared to the cost. Most banner ad sales firms will be able to provide this information in their sales pitch.

There are many approaches about where to place banner ads. Sometimes, of course, salespeople will come knocking, hoping you will advertise on their websites and detailing their success rates with sales figures, click-through rates and promised impressions.

Alternatively, you can do the knocking and approach websites on which you want to advertise. This approach gives you better control over which websites your banner ads will appear. Often, Internet marketers will represent many different websites, so you may not always know exactly where your ads will appear. This may be off-putting to some who want tight control over their company's advertising and marketing messages.

If ad budgets are tight, an alternative may be to join a “banner network,” in which you exchange space for websites' banners and other links with other website operators. Joining some of these networks is free (if you agree to their terms and conditions), but most charge fees. It's important to keep in mind that you can lose some control of your advertising and marketing messages as you may not be aware of all the sites on which you are advertising.