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Does Banner Ad Still Work?
Paid advertising may sound scary to small Internet business
owners, but some form of paid ads is important sometimes if you wish to grow your business since paid ads motivate others to
spread your marketing message to their own networks of visitors and customers.
One form of paid ads is Banner Ad. Banner ads have been around the longest. It was once very popular long time ago, I
mean 3 years ago. At that time, everybody was talking about building a web site, attract traffic, and then - sell
advertising space! I would say, huge banner ads spending was one of the reasons many dot-coms failed.
Today, banner ads have lost its popularity and effectiveness,
for both advertisers and publishers.
Typically these are 468x60 pixel animated and linked graphic
ads that appear at the top of a web page. They are usually sold on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis. Targeted sites
may get CPM rates of $35-50 or more, but banner ads to reach general audiences are priced $1 to $10 CPM. Banners that pop up
on search sites triggered by a keyword can cost $20 to $30 CPM.
Can you justify the cost? Be very careful and always do the
math first. If you're paying $10 CPM and the click-through rate is an industry average of 0.5%, then it costs you $10 to get 5
people to your site, or $2 each! If 5% of the visitors to your site make a purchase, which is pretty high conversion rate,
then the cost per customer is $40.
Luckily, price is always negotiable nowadays. Realize that
there is a lot more banner ad space available right now than is actually being sold, though this may not be true for the niche
sites you may be interested in. It is a buyer's market, so it pays to negotiate.
The more impressions you are ready to buy, the stronger your
negotiating strength. Contact the webmaster and ask for a Rate Card. It is just a place to begin the negotiations.
If you ask me, I would suggest that the maximum price of banner
ads for small business is $10 CPM.
However, you may want to spend more on banner ads some day for
some reason. For example, your business have grown to such a stage that brand name, not the direct sales, is very critical
for you. That's why the big guys still put banner ads at popular commercial sites and search engines.
Then there are Banner Ad Networks who can help manage large
scale banner ads campaigns. They also offer very sophisticated tracking tools that give you lots of valuable information about
who is visiting your site, and what actions they are taking.
Some of the popular banner ads networks include:
DoubleClick
Engage Media
Microsoft bCentral's LinkExchange Banner Network
There are also other types of paid ads. The quickest, lowest cost, and most effective type of paid online ads is placing
Sponsorships or Solo Ads in Ezines
(email newsletter).
Nothing else will even come close to the results you can
produce through this method. You can purchase sponsorships
or solo ads for $100 to $500 and often get results of three
to five times it costs if you have an effective ad sales
copy for the target audience. There isn't anywhere else
that you can get this kind of return for your buck when
it comes to spending money on marketing. Another good idea is Ezine Classifieds.
You can advertise in ezines with 10,000 to 300,000 opt-in
subscribers for less than $50.00. You can reach thousands
of potential customers in your targeted market. Click through
rates are likely to be in the range of 1% to 3%. With thousands of different ezines available, you can expand
into hundreds of them once you find a classified ad and
follow-up system that works for your product or service.
Don't forget to Track All Of Your
Ads. Any ad, including free ones, you place without
tracking is wasted time and money! Without proper tracking,
you won't know how your marketing methods are doing, which
ones are making money for you and you should keep doing,
how much you can afford on advertising, whether you should
improve your sales copy or ad...
Feel free to use this article in your
publication or web site.
It's pre-licensed to you.
The only requirement is to include this resource box:
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Article by Zac Hewlett at
1stSingaporeWebHosting
Visit http://www.1stSingaporeWebHosting.com
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