Is Banner Advertising Dead and Buried?

Banner advertising as an advertising medium has been around since almost the start of the internet but has it passed its sell by date and lost its effectiveness entirely?

(PRWEB) December 17, 2005 -- Banner advertising has been around almost as long as websites themselves. They come in all shapes and sizes - wide, tall, square, and in may different formats - floating, static etc. They are now almost ubiquitous - nearly every site you visit contains one or more banners. But do they still do the job they were originally designed for - do they still bring in the sales?

There has been much talk lately about the supposed declining effectiveness of banner advertising. The first factor that has been attributed to causing the decline in effectiveness of banners is a phenomenon called "banner blindness". Banner blindness is the semi-automatic ability of a web surfer to "filter out" the banner content on the website they are visiting. This filtering obviously has catastrophic effects on the usefulness of banner advertising.

But does this so called "banner blindness" actually exist. I would say this would depend largely upon the experience of the surfer visiting the site. It is far more likely that an experienced surfer would have developed the skills to quickly assimilate and process the information on a website than would a newbie. The experienced surfer would have the ability to quickly scan for the information they are looking for and quickly disregard the rest - a bit like speed reading. But I would suggest that this is a very small minority of your potential visitors.

The second element is that of falling CTRs ( Click Through Rate - the number of clicks divided by the number of times the banner has been shown). Whilst the CTR of banner have undoubtedly been falling ( in the early days of the medium it was possible to get CTRs of 5% now 0.05% is not unheard of) is this a major concern ?. At first glance this seems like a stupid question - if people are not clicking on the banners what is the point? The answer to this depends on two factors - 1) The purpose of the banner campaign and 2) the cost of the campaign.

If the purpose of your banner advertising is to get sales then CTR is important but if building brand and establishing your web presence is also important then CTR is less important. The more times a surfer sees your brand / message then the more comfortable they become and thus the chances of a productive relationship in the future increases.

Cost of advertising is a major issue also - if you are spending big bucks on your banner campaign then you need to see sales in order to give you a decent return on investment. However if your campaign is low cost or even free then return is not so important. But how do you run a low cost or even free banner campaign? There are now many resources you help do exactly this ( try http://www.freefirebanners.com for example).

In summary - banner advertising is still a good choice to build your brand ( and make sales) but it must be done in a cost effective manner by using resources such as those available at http://www.freefirebanners.com

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