Posted by Bart on October 26, 2010
An Ad Banner is composed of 2 things:
- an image (or a video)
- a link
An Ad Banner works like an Hyperlink. It is actually an Hyperlink with an Anchor, the image and a Target, the link.
The image:
The image can of course be a drawing, a picture, etc. and contain text or even music and video. The image is either a file (GIF file or video file) or a link to an hosted image. This means that the Ad on a website may either be a file hosted on the website, or a link that will upload an image from another website. This is transparent for the Internet User, but important for the Ad Management.
The link:
The link is an Hyperlink that will redirect to the website of the product or service the Ad is promoting.
A basic link is:
http://www.costperwhat.com.
However the link can be a bit more complex and include additional information.
For instance the link can redirect to a specific page of the website: http://www.costperwhat.com/glossary/ (it will then redirect directly to the Glossary page).
But a link can also contain much more information, like the link below:
http://tmc.go2jump.org/aff_c?offer_id=36&aff_id=5
We will see in a next post what all this information is for.
The technology of putting a maximum of information into the links is what allows Online Advertising to do some tracking, and that’s what makes Online Advertising such a powerful tool compare to traditional (offline) advertising.
Posted by Bart on October 22, 2010
The Banner Ad or Web Banner is probably the most obvious form of Online Advertising.
A Banner Ad is a still image (JPEG or GIF file), an animated image (GIF file) or a Flash animation with texts, images, pictures and/or videos.
The Banner Ad features a message promoting a product or a service.
When an Internet user clicks on a banner, he opens the web page of the product or service. The link between the banner and the new web page is an hypertext link.
The first Banner Ads to appear on the World Wide Web were not always clickable, because at this time not all advertisers had a website. Nowadays, publishing non-clickable banners would not make sense because each and every advertiser is supposed to have at least a web page. Internet user could even become frustrated of not being able to click on the Ad when they are interested in the product or the service.
An Ad Banner may be seen (or not), clicked on (or not) and generate an action from the Internet user (or not). Because all these options are not only possible, but also traceable (thanks to tracking), different type of Online Advertising payment have appeared : the most common ones are Cost per Impression (CPM), Cost per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Action (CPA, or per Lead, CPL).
These models have quickly replaced the old form of payment that was based on the duration of the Ad being displayed (per day, per week, per month, etc.). However this model (cost per duration) is still strongly in use for small websites or in emerging Internet markets (Africa, South America, some parts of Asia, etc.).
To display the banners on their website, webmasters have 2 choices: Either they put the banner code directly on their website, or they use an Ad Server. The Ad Server is a tool that will allow webmasters to manage several different banners on the same spot, to define the frequency, the duration, the number of impressions, etc. and even to target only a part of the website audience.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!