Traditional online marketing

The advertising banners: the classic option to enter circulation

The undoubtedly oldest option to enter circulation on the Web is the use of banners. Banners are advertising spaces, of variable size, which are usually rented on Web portals with a high index of visitors and which, when clicked on, lead to the Web page of the one advertised on them.

As a concept, advertising with banners is very similar to newspaper ads. In every city there are clients who, every week, look for articles. By reaching precisely those customers, the companies offer a catalog of the article in question for a period of time.

Note
Banners can have different shapes and sizes. The most used size is 468 x 60 pixels and is known as a full banner.

Lately, banners with Flash technology have been used more and more, a technology that offers greater freedom of design to the bidder. The user can recognize it by the complex animations that it presents almost always, destined to draw his attention, but that end up distracting from its authentic purpose: to read the text.

That's why most people do not like these banners, and some feel real rejection for this form of advertising. Some tests show, again and again, that the experienced Web user does not even perceive banners, a phenomenon known as "blindness to banners" and that has led, by extension, to systematically ignore anything that moves on the screen, blink p have the slightest optical resemblance to a banner.

In the past, banners were accounted for by eye contact (AdViews or AdImpression). When a page with a banner is activated, the visitor has the opportunity to see the banner once (a visit), and the advertisers in the banner paid for an amount for each thousand visual contacts, or page activations (CMP, Cost per Mille).

When a fairer agreement was adopted little by little: the bidder only had to pay for the times the banner was clicked (AdClicks). The billing mode changed its name to CPC (Cost per Click).

Other more modern calculation systems are, for example, the Cost per Lead (CPL). Here it is not just that the visitor presses a banner and enters the page of the bidder, but must also perform a previously defined action so that those who offer the space for the banner get their benefits. An action of this type can be subscribed to a newsletter, or fill out and send a contact form, in which case AdLeads speaks.

But the most effective form of advertising with banners, from the point of view of the bidder, are without doubt the AdSales. In this system, whoever offers the space for the banner only takes its commission if the visitor really buys something.

Since the probabilities here and in the AdLeads are much smaller, the costs in these two forms of propaganda are usually higher. In the AdSale, a percentage is normally paid on the profit obtained in the sale.

The most important types of banners can be classified, in terms of their content, as:

• Static (without animations)
• Animated (with movement)
• Interactive (the user can select elements within the banner)
• Rich media (contains short video sequences, sometimes with sound)

Note:
Other types of banners are, in addition, streaming, pixel or nano site.

Currently, the advanced techniques of browsers used by users are complicating things to those who advertise on the Web. New browsers offer users different possibilities to automatically hide pop-up ads and banners.