Banner advertising is, according to Wikipedia; “a web banner or banner ad is a form of advertising on the World Wide Web. This form of online advertising entails embedding an advertisement into a web page. It is intended to attract traffic to a website by linking to the website of the advertiser. They often employ animation, sound, or video to maximize presence.
Images are usually in a high-aspect ratio shape (i.e. either wide and short, or tall and narrow) hence the reference to banners. These images are usually placed on web pages that have interesting content, such as a newspaper article or an opinion piece. Affiliates earn money usually on a CPC (cost per click) basis. For every unique user click on the ad, the affiliate earns money.”
Banner ads are considered in many circles online to be an excellent technique for driving traffic to your website. You can target your market by selecting websites relating to your product or service. Selectively placing ads in this manner can often result in an immediate response. You can approach the web sites yourself in order to control how and where your ad is placed. This method however can be very time consuming but the resulting control over your banner ads make the time involved worthwhile.
Secondly, banner ads can be a very inexpensive way to drive traffic to your home business site if you only target smaller sites that don’t receive a lot of traffic, but it is traffic related to your product offering. Therefore this traffic will be interested in what you have to offer and, more often than not, will click through to your home page. Banner ads can become very expensive if you concentrate on high traffic web sites to display your message.
A third benefit of banner ads is your ad is only a click away from driving traffic to your site and therefore only a click away from a prospective customer. These ads make it very easy for others to access your home business page to view and read about your offer. This also helps to get your home business noticed online, whether they purchase or not.
Banner advertising is also very trackable. In other words you can track the number of clicks on a particular ad to determine it’s effectiveness and also find out which web sites are producing the highest yield of new visitors to your site.
And finally banner ads offer an advantage over Search Engine Optimization in that through SEO the prospective customer has to know the name of your product in order to track you down. However with banner advertising all they have to do is click on your ad and they’re immediately transported to you product information page.
Banner advertising offers many more advantages than disadvantages and will continue to be a popular traffic driving technique for home business owners online.