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This is nearly just as important as designing the banner itself. Even if you
have the best designed banner in the world you won't achieve good results unless
you publish the banner ad in the right place.
There are a few things you need to consider when deciding where to publish
your banner ads:
Target Audience & Choosing a Suitable Site
This is quite obvious but is worth mentioning as it is so important. Now that
you have your banner ad designed and ready you need to think who your target
audience is. If you have a online guitar shop this will obviously be guitarists,
if you own a arcade site it will be the younger children & gamers in general.
Once you have identified your target audience you will need to look for a suitable
site. Using the example of the guitar shop owner again, we would need to find sites
where guitarists would go. Some examples would be sites that provide guitar lessons,
tablatures, sheet music, forums, etc... Use a search engine to find these sites and
make a list of those sites. It may also be worth looking in their link section to find
other sites that are also related.
Now you have a list of potential sites to advertise on, you must analyze each
of them to determine which would be best for you banner ad campaign.
Location of Banner on Site
The actual placement is another major factor in the effectiveness of the banner
ad. As always it is best if it is placed above the fold as this is the most prominent
position on the page and will receive the most exposure. Analyze each site on your
list and note down where the banner will be placed.
Traffic to Site
The main objective of a banner ad is to actually get visitors to your site as if you
wanted to boost your PR then you could do that through text links. You should therefore
try and find out the amount of traffic the website receives. There are several methods
of doing this.
One way would be to ask the webmaster for traffic stats and some screenshots for proof.
This would be the most ideal way of finding out the volume of traffic the site receives
but firstly you would need to get in direct contact with the webmaster, which sounds easy but
sometimes is not (inactive email, message deleted along with spammy emails etc...). Secondly
the webmaster may not bother proving you with the information as it's too much hassle for
them.
The second method would be to rely on Alexa traffic rankings. In case you don't know
what that is you should read this article titled "What Is Alexa Rank & Why Is It Inaccurate".
As mentioned in this article, Alexa rank is a very vague measure of traffic and should
not be relied on too much. However if the webmaster is not providing any information then
it is the only measure of traffic you can readily get access to.
Pagerank of Site
Compared to the traffic of the site, this is a minor issue but definitely one that
should be considered. Obviously the higher the pagerank the better - well when just
considering pagerank that is.
Price
When starting an banner ad campaign you should determine a budget for yourself and
try to keep to it. Once you have a budget you can decide whether or not the fee a site
is charging to host your banner is too much or not.
Make sure you also research about how the fee is charged. When I say this I don't
just mean in terms of payment method (PayPal, MoneyBookers, etc...), but facts such as
is the banner charged on a periodic basis, by CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), or
maybe even PPCT (Price Per Click Through). You need to know exactly how much you are
looking to have to pay before you start.
Banner Exchanges
If you don't want to pay for your banner ad campaign you could consider banner
exchanges. This is where you show other peoples' banners on your site in exchange
for them showing yours banner on their site. There are many websites that are
dedicated to offering a bridge between people looking to do this, just search for
"Banner Exchange" in your favorite search engine.
| Designing Banner Ads | Tracking the Performance of Banner Ads | |
