Online Advertising: Banner Ad

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!