Online marketing

Enhanced online marketing: banner ads

You may wish to structure your paid online marketing strategy to include more than just search engine marketing (SEM). While SEM holds great value and provides a great opportunity to be present in the right place and at the right time—when your target audience is looking up ‘your’ keywords—there are additional tools that can assist your organisation to build your brand appeal and drive brand engagement.

A banner ad is an advertisement for your organisation that is embedded into someone else’s webpage and appears as an image. If interested, people can then click on the banner ad to visit your website.

Banner advertising can prove more eye-catching than, for example, the typical text-based ads that are used for SEM. It allows you greater creative freedom in colours, fonts and images, but also allows for movement, sound or video.

Some websites charge on a pay per click basis to run your banner ads. This means you pay only for the traffic sent to your website resulting from users that click on your ad. However, some websites may also expect a pay per impression payment structure (also known as cost per impression), which means that you pay for the number of times the advertisement is displayed on the relevant website.

You may not necessarily need to look for high traffic sites on which to place your ad to drive high levels of interest in your banner ad. A niche offer on a site with the right audience may be all you need. You could even consider linking up with other websites offering complementary services. Some examples are a retailer selling garden furniture that offers advertising space on its site for a garden centre or an environmental organisation offering advertising space on its site for a provider of rainwater tanks.