A marketer's guide to banner advertising

Like many other marketers you may be thinking about allocating a big whack of your 2008 online budget to the search engines. After all, pay-per-click (PPC) keyword campaigns are measureable, targeted and on a cost-per-visit basis, they’re amongst the cheapest means of driving eyeballs to your website.

But in our Google obsessed world, it’s easy to ignore banner ads, the nearest alternative. Banners are still seen by many as a hangover from the dotcom bubble because their share of online spend crashed versus the strong rise of pay-per-click advertising. But things are stabilising and the banner is finding its footing again. According to PWC, in 2006 US advertisers spent $5.4bn on banner space versus $6.8bn on search engines and $73bn on TV. Cast your mind back too, and you’ll note that unlike pay-per-click advertising, banner advertising has been evolving constantly.

Banners are changing

There are now many different formats and types of banner ads. There are skyscrapers, takeovers, transitions, rich media banners with video and audio. You can even have banners that are web forms and allow the user to submit data like name and address details straight from the banner without needing to click through to anywhere. This is powerful stuff and, if done correctly, let’s you as an advertiser put across a much more sophisticated and engaging message than ever before.

The differences between banners and PPC

Banner ads are often compared side-by-side with pay-per-click search engine ads. This can be misleading because unlike PPC ads, banners are display ads and can deliver a rich, visual message whilst also providing an opportunity for the user to click for more info. Obviously, pay-per-click ads deliver a message too but the impact of that message is far reduced because PPC ads are textual and most of the time they’re lined up alongside other competitor PPC ads. But that’s not all. There’s a fundamental difference between the PPC and banners that is often overlooked. With PPC, the user actively finds the advertiser through a search engine. With banner ads the advertiser finds the user. Here often lies the answer to the question as to whether banners are right for you.

Are banners right for your brand?

You need to be realistic about your product or service: are people really interested in going to your site? Are they searching Google for information related to your product or is your product in a low interest category like soap powder, car tyres, or chocolate bars? If people aren’t finding you through the search engines, then you need to find them, and banners are just the tool for that.

If you already advertise your brand on TV or print, then banners are definitely worth a look if only on the grounds of cost. We recently compared the costs and performance of one of our FMCG client’s media campaigns. They ran a promotional campaign across banners and offline print media. We found that on the basis of CPM (cost per thousand impressions), banners were less than one third the cost of the print ads.

Banner creative: the number one thing you need to know

Banner creative is incredibly important. Let me say that again. Creative is incredibly important. Poorly created banners are easy to ignore. In fact, the usability guru Jakob Nielsen, has done extensive research with eye tracking lasers that monitor the eye movements of web users. Nielsen found that users have developed banner blindness – they rarely look at web content that looks like an ad. Click here to see some heat maps that demonstrate this (you'll need to scroll half way down the page to see the heatmaps). Nielsen’s research also reveals four types of banner creative that are somehow immune to banner blindness and continue to catch the user’s attention. They are those that show nudity, human faces, plain text and finally, those banners that look like content, not ads.

How to run a banner campaign

If you work with a media agency, they should be able to run your campaign for you – all you will need to do is provide the creative. If not, you will need to buy the banner space from website publishers, approaching each one individually and negotiating rates. You’ll need to understand and work with the different formats, positions, technical restrictions and other details imposed by each publisher. You will probably also need to use a banner host or server – a company that specialises in hosting banners. The advantage with these is that they can give you great data on the effectiveness of your ad. They will also give you lots of control so if you find shortly into your campaign that one creative execution is less effective than another, you can optimise the campaign to use the more effective one.

This last point is a good conclusion – like any other type of advertising, monitoring results is incredibly important. You need to go into banner advertising with an open mind, understanding that you won’t hit the jackpot straight off. However, with the huge amount of data and feedback available, you will be able to fine-tune your advertising so that with time, it proves to be more effective and certainly cheaper than many offline equivalents.