Advertising online is one of the most efficient and effective ways to share information about your brand, product, or service. One of the principal forms of online advertising is through banner ads. Banner ads are ads that appear on the sides, tops, or bottoms of a webpage that are unaffiliated with the website itself.
If you’ve used the internet, you’ve seen banner ads before (unless you are using an ad blocker!). Today, nearly every popular commercial website has ads running along the sides as they are an efficient way for the website owner to earn passive income. In fact, if your website has been approached by an ad network asking to display ads within your domain, you could view that as a mark of success!
If you are a marketer or a website owner, here are a few important things to know about banner ads.
Google Ads Will be Your Friend
Google Ads is the most comprehensive ad network online today. Within Google Ads there are several different options of advertisement to choose from, ranging from search ads, which appear atop search results pages, to shopping ads, which look like an ecommerce listing.
Google Display Ads are the specific type of ad choice that will appear as banner ads on a third-party site. By working with Google Ads, you will be able to create banner ads, select your target audience, and let Google do the rest of the work.
Choosing what your ad looks like is the foundation of your marketing effort. As a marketer, you must be under the assumption that internet users do not want to see your ads polluting a website they visit, and as such, need to make your ads unobtrusive while also being informative. A good practice is to keep things simple, have all your information easily readable, and not use flashy images or graphics.
You will also want to make use of the different types of banner ads available, including static and dynamic banners. Static ads, as the name suggests, will remain the same regardless of who is seeing them. In contrast, dynamic banners will change depending on who sees them.
Open Your Site to Advertisers
As a website owner or webmaster of a successful site, you will ultimately need to make the decision to allow display ads or not. As mentioned above, being asked to display ads is a mark of success.
Should you accept ads on your platform, you can work with the display network to create limits on what kinds of ads appear on your site and which segment they are targeting. For example, a forum for death metal music is not the place to display advertising for a live smooth jazz band! As the webmaster, you must consider your user base’s interests.
Having ads on your website is also a great way to make passive income. There is little to do but continue trying to drive traffic to your website, though in this case, you get paid if you attract more visitors.
