A few years ago I wrote
an article called
Aspects of Web
Advertising in which I described the alternative ways in which you can use
banner ads. For example, as a publisher, we've been using banner ads for 4 years
to promote new articles, news headlines etc. That box on the top left hand
corner of your browser screen, with the mouse reading the scroll, is one of more
than 1,500 designs I've run over the year just to let readers know about other
stuff which is on this (and other) web site(s). As with any banner ad, I can
measure in real time which article links or headlines are most popular, and kill
those which have low interest. It's also a way to discover if a new subject area
is going to be popular.
Many people just think of "banner ads"
as a way to get people to click and visit their web site. That's as accurate as
saying that you can use the pages in a newspaper to light a fire. It's
technically accurate, but completely misses the point. A banner ad should be
regarded as a communication which changes the way that someone thinks about
your company, or changes their behaviour. When you ordered the banner ad,
you bought the right to communicate a guaranteed number of times with potential
customers, using an industry standard size window and format.
There
are 2 sets of viewers who see you banner ad, and you should cater for both.
- the most important set, are the 94% to 99.5% who are typically
going to see the banner, but not click on it at that moment in time.
What
impression are they left with after seeing the banner? A well designed banner
will convey the message that your company's name and logo are connected with a
particular type of product or service. Most readers will not have a need to
follow up that particular idea at the moment, but over a long period of time you
can use banners for branding. The impression that you give the reader is that
when they have a future need for your product or service, you are in that
market. They can easily follow it up, because you have invested in advertising,
which is a customer service. The advertising signposts you leave around the web
mean they don't have to work hard to find you amongst more than 2 billion web
pages.
If your banner ad appears on a specialised portal, then readers
can search for your company based on what they remember from the banner ad. The
effect can be larger than the number which instantaneously clicked on the
banner. If you have a short and memorable url, like www.hp.com, then show it in
the banner ad, in blue underlined text like a link. Readers can remember short
links long after after they see the original banner.
- the next most important set are the 0.5% to 6% or so of viewers who
instantly clicked to follow up on more information, when they saw the banner.
Maybe they're just curious, or maybe they're actively researching for suppliers
of your kind of products. You've made contact, but remember they're in control
and can disengage at any time. Even if they're really interested, they're not
going to add a $100,000 solid state disk to their shopping cart and charge it to
Visa. What happens next depends on the value of the product or service, and what
it's reasonable for a buyer to do. With careful planning, the web page they see
next reassures them they've come to the right place and provides information
they expected to see. It invites other actions by links which give them
options to see more information, make contact with your company, or inititiate a
buying process.
The banner can filter interest for different types of
products, and / or different types of customer. Viewers will self select a
banner which looks like it's addressed to them. This can also backfire, if your
message is too vague, because readers can also self select themselves out.
A message which says "come to our event in Santa Clara next
Friday " will work better than one which simply says "we're holding an
event" with the location and date unspecified. What happens next will
depend on what they see on the landing page they get routed to. If your web site
doesn't make it easy for them to get more information, or it doesn't say
anything at all which looks familiar, then you've just wasted a customer
communication and you're in trouble. A good strategy is to repeat the banner ad
on the target page, with some expanding text which says more than you could in
the ad format. But if the banner contained your logo, and all your web pages
include your logo, that's another familiar reference point.The reader doesn't
think they've gone to the wrong place, and will invest a few more seconds to
look at what's on that page. Use banners for PR. When you
launch a new product, then instead of running a banner ad which simply contains
a picture of your product and the price, you can run simple text with the first
line from your press release with your logo, and just lead readers into your
press release. The click rates could be higher, but also as part of the process
you have the satisfaction of knowing that 50,000 people, or however many banner
impressions you bought, are aware of your news headline. And as I said in my
original article, if you've bought and paid for an advertising communications
medium which has a guaranteed delivery format and time frame, then you don't
have to bother about taking the editor out to lunch. |
| The industry standard size for a banner ad is 468 x 60
pixles. That's the same size as the block of text on the right. |
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Tape Libraries on
STORAGEsearch.com |
| Megabyte
found that the advantage of taped storage was that he could store a huge
amount. But it sometimes took a long time to retrieve what he wanted. | |
