Actually, banner ads ARE best form of online ads!

Internet advertising expenditures declined overall in 2001, yet this decline was felt in all advertising sectors of economy and online decline was actually less that that found in other advertising sectors. According to Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB), http://www.iab.net/ online Ad Formats break down as follows:

"Percentage use of various ad formats remained fairly consistent in 2001. Formats tracked and their respective share of 2000 and 2001 full year revenue are: "

2000 2001 Banners 48% 36% Sponsorships 28% 26% Classifieds 7% 16%

Ad revenues for 2002 are expected to surpass these figures with majority of ad revenues being funneled into Banner Ad campaigns.

In a report compiled and released by Engage, Inc. http://www.engage.com/, they announced that their:

"Study Reveals That Viewing of Online Ads Alone, Regardless of Click-Through, Leads To Sales".

This report has put a new spin on traditional methods behind banner ads because lead finding determined that there is a strong pattern emerging of users who recently saw an online ad and converting that ad exposure into a sale.

There is now a measurable and concrete value to an ad impression WITHOUT a click-thru.

Advertisers will now need to pay attention to 99% of people that don't click-thru on their ads but do take note of message for future reference and visits.

This fundamentally raises monetary value of Internet as an advertising medium, because this analysis demonstrates that just seeing a banner ad alone WILL create sales.

Even though we have all read news about declining effectiveness of banners on web, I still believe that with right 'ingredients' banners can be a good source of visitors and income for most webmasters.

There are five of these ingredients that I'd consider most important, using all or most of them will always enable you to get a higher click through for your various banners. I'll list them and then continue to discuss each one in a bit more detail.

Small file Call to action Animation Good ad copy Fake factor

1. Small file This is one of most important things you have to get right when designing a banner, if .gif or .jpg file is large it will take a few seconds to download and by then visitor might have scrolled down page, meaning he or she doesn't even get to see your banner. If people don't see your banner they definitely are not going to click on it. So make sure your file stays below 10K, 15K at absolute most, it's sometimes hard to do, but if others can do it, we can do it too.

2. Call to action This is one of easiest ways to increase CTR (click through rate) of a banner, on this all experts agree. Using a call to action simply involves having words 'click here' or some other words such as 'sign up now' or something similar.

My thoughts on why using a call to action increases CTR so much include fact that there is so much advertising off-line, such as TV, Radio, billboards etc. etc. With advertising on these off-line mediums, target audiences are generally just required to watch or read ad. All ads online have a link and purpose is to get people to click on ad and visit advertisers website, however with world being so used to off-line advertising many people just see banners and think that's it, they don't realize that they are actually meant to click on it to find out more. That's way having click here or another call to action improves effectiveness of a banner.