What is banner advertising?

There are as many different ways of doing banner advertising as there are sites offering the service. On the surface it really is simple and breaks down into two categories:

- Let's swap banners and each gets more traffic.

You can do this with a specific site where you each run the other's banner and get traffic from each other's sites. Or, you can enter into a banner exchange program, where you run random banners for other sites and other random sites run your banner. For every banner you run for someone else, you get to run some portion of a banner on other sites. The difference is used by the exchange service to make a living and pay their expenses. They sell it to paid advertisers.

- I have lots of traffic and want to make money by selling ad space on my site to help support my site and myself.

Just like a magazine selling ads, but you only pay for the actual number of people that see your ad.
Notice the above sentence said “see your ad” not “read your ad”. All a banner provider can guarantee is that your ad will appear on the page. They can't promise that anyone will read it, or if they do, that they will click on it to visit your site.

Effective banners are your responsibility. You have to develop a banner program that works, and one that motivates people to visit the site behind the ad. As a rule, all good advertising involves grabbing the viewer's attention, tweaking their curiosity and motivating a positive response. In this case, the positive response we want is for the viewer to click on the ad and visit our site.

Good banner ads don't provide a lot of information about the site or service. That is the job of the site itself. The banner should grab their attention. It should scream “I know something you don't, but I will tell you." Don't overlook humor. It is the best way to get click-through.

Click-through is measured in “How many people click on the banner out of how many that actually saw it?” A click-through of 20:1 means that for every 20 viewers, one visited the site. In all actuality, 20:1 is very good. The average for the year 2002 is 3.5 clicks per one thousand impressions.