Archive for the ‘Banner Advertising Basics’ Category

That’s an interesting question for the experienced online marketers and a rather confusing one for the Internet novices who want to make an incursion into the world of online advertising.

But let’s give up acronyms and baffling jargon and let’s see what is all about. Advertising on the Internet can be purchased in various systems, the most common being CPM (Cost Per Mille), CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPA (Cost Per Action).

CPM alias Cost Per Mille alias Cost Per Thousand impressions

Represents how much it will cost for an ad to be shown a thousand times. For example, a website could sell banner ads for $50 CPM. CPM is used not only in online advertising, but also in television, radio and in print.

The CPM system favours only the publishers because they’ll receive revenue regardless of the campaign’s success. Also, a thousand impressions doesn’t guarantee that the ad will be actually seen 1000 times; the system only guarantees that it will be displayed 1000 times for a certain amount of money. The system’s most important advantage for advertisers is the fact that they can easily compare media prices.

These facts made many of the advertisers move towards CPC and CPA.

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As we’ve seen in the article called “Maximum recommended banner file size”, there are some restrictions regarding the banner ads’ file size. These restrictions are set by publishers in order to keep their pages decently quick to download. They are encompassed in an IAB standard.

Since it’s very easy to go over the line with the banner’s file size, let’s see some simple and quick ways to optimize your banner, whether it’s going to be a static or a flash animated one:

1. Crop or resize your images. If you are going to make a 300×250 px banner don’t load a picture of say 2400×1554 px. Use an image editor like Photoshop, Paint, Photo-Paint, IrfanView etc. to crop off the area of the picture you need.

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You know, ad placement is very important. Especially online. Good marketers try to increase the click through rate by placing their ads on well targeted websites. They try to make their ads appear on topic and in context in order to make them relevant.

Sometimes they manage to do it right. Sometimes they fail. FAIL!

But it’s not their fault. It’s fate. The odds. Misfortune. Irony. Laughable coincidences.

View the 11 Worst Placed Ads EVER:

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In a previous post we saw what an interactive banner ad looks like. Now it’s time to figure out what a rich media banner is, ’cause advertisers are rightfully crazy about them: they work much better than the conventional ones.

Let’s play with an example and then talk a little about it:

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In order to enhance the user experience, flash banners are often interactive. That means that they react in accordance with the user’s actions. The most common features of an interactive banner are the rollover buttons, checkboxes, in-banner navigation systems, sound on/off buttons, play-pause buttons, close buttons and so on. Also interactive banners are often expandable and/or retractable, which means they can change their size based on user action.

Let’s see a simple example of interactive banner:

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In a previous article we talked about banner standard sizes, one of the most important metrics in banner advertising. Now the second metric in the order of its importance is the file size or file weight. The file size is measured in bytes, often with the kilo- (thousand) or mega- (million) metric prefixes, and it represents the amount of disk space consumed by a particular file.

As with other files, banners (JPGs, GIFs, SWFs etc.) have certain file weights. These files are temporarily downloaded on the users’ computers when they open a web page, so the bigger a banner file is, the heavier and slower to download that web page will be. That made publishers introducing some restrictions regarding the file sizes of the banners they would accept. And that was the first step to introducing a set of universally accepted standards concerning the banner file sizes.

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We mentioned something about how important are the banner metrics in banner advertising. And the most significant metric regarding banners is the banner size, measured Width x Height in pixels (px).

The idea is that a banner can be made in virtually any size you wish. That’s pretty cool. And yet, if every advertiser would create its banners using its own size preferences, there would be chaos. Websites would look like sloppy collages, publishers would create in-house standards for the banners they accept, media agencies would work hard creating custom banners for every website they want to advertise on and so on.

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This is the third and last “lesson” regarding the differences between the flash, static and gif banners. You can read the previous articles here and here. Today we’ll talk about gif banners.

GIF banners

GIF banners are animated or static images that contain images and text and carry the .gif extension. Animated GIFs comprise a number of images (frames) that are displayed one after another and thus creating the sense of motion. A GIF file that contains only a frame is static.

Example:

Advantages:

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Static banners

A static banner takes the shape of an image that might contain graphics and text. Most of these static banners are .jpg files, but you can also find them in .png, and .gif. GIF banners can be static and animated, but we’ll talk more about GIFs in the next “lesson”.

Example:

Advantages:

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We’ll going to start a 3-post series about the three main banner types: flash, gif and static. We’ll give you a short definition for each of them and we’ll tell you what advantages and disadvantages each of them carry (promise it won’t be as boring as it sounds). Today we’ll begin with flash banners.

Flash banners

A flash banner is an animated web banner created using Adobe Flash technology. These banners employ complex animations (like movies) and sound and are often interactive (they “react” based on what the user is doing). Physically, flash banners are .swf objects embedded into web pages.

Example:

Advantages:

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