Banner advertising actually pioneered the world of Internet marketing. The first banner ad appeared in 1994. Presently, online users are becoming more and more skilled online and more aware of online advertisements. Many view these advertisements as nuisances and are almost always ignored by average users. This has been proven by the figures showing that banner advertisements have a low CTR or click-through-rate, the average less than 0.5 percent of the number of hits that is received by the website.
However, while the CTR of banner advertising continues to decrease, together with the cost of putting a banner advertisement on your website. Before, only the larger companies that have substantial advertising budgets could afford to have banner advertising. Presently, virtually anyone could advertise through numerous websites who are selling bundles of 1,000 views or better known as “impressions”. However, with 1,000 impressions with an average cost of $4 and a 0.5 percent CTR, this would translate to only 5 clicks – which is hardly worth the amount being paid.
These insignificant results have been able to force advertisers in rethinking their techniques to advertise and find new ones. A more popular technique today would be contextual advertising, which is a system that has been originally developed by Google through the AdSense program, which displays advertisements on the relevant websites through their search engine, as well as their partner websites on the Internet. This technique ensures that the advertisers are able to reach their target market and that they would just be paying per click of the online user.
With this, has banner advertising really lost its appeal? Though it is no longer as popular, it could still be somehow effective if you would be creating a unique advertisement and would be advertising on the most suitable and relevant websites.
Source by Bill Pratt
