Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing businesson the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day brickand mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more dramaticand may have greater impact than in a conventional business.Success in this climate can only come from quick response to thechanges. Look at web advertisement! Just in a few short years,we have seen rise and fall of banner advertisement, emailmarketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number of other marketingtools.

Consider banner advertisement. In the beginning of Internet era,banner advertisement was one of the primer methods of onlinemarketing. There were not many quality sites in those days. Insearch of good feature and content filled websites visitorswere clicking through banners aggressively. Today, things aretotally different! Over using of banners on the web pagesforced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more.Visitors tend to avoid clicking through the banners unlessthere is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that meanthe banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon!

Although, banner click through rate is quite low in comparisonto what it used to be, depending on your objectives banneradvertisement can still be very effective. Banner ads areused today, either for creating brand recognition or forbringing in more traffic to the website and consequentlygenerating more sales.

Brand recognition

As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies placebanners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently postedon high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of yourproducts or services popular to certain niche market, youshould find websites catering this particular audience andpost banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whetherthey click on it or not - same like traditional bill boardsand TV advertisements - it helps you building consciousnessto your brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be aseffective as television advertising as far as brandrecognition is concerned. A survey was conducted amongmembers of American Online who saw an ad of a productas a banner on the website and on TV commercial. Theresult indicated that 40 percent of the audience remembersthe static banners and 41 percent remembers the TVcommercial at the time of the poll conducted a few dayslater.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brandrecognition effect from online ad campaign in comparisonto traditional forms of advertisements for around 60percent less cost. However, same like offline ads, inorder to create a sustainable brand recognition, youronline advertisement campaign also needs to run for aprolong period of time.

Generating traffic

Banner ads could be a good source of high quality trafficfor your website if you manage your banner ad campaignwisely. If your main purpose of the campaign is to generatemore sales by attracting traffic - which is any way shouldbe the main goal of any e-commerce site - you have to selectsites to post banners where you target audience frequentlyvisit. Pay per click search engines like Overture or GoogleAdwords are good options for your textual banner ads. Sincethe visitors are already looking for a website like yoursby searching for the keyword that you have selected toplace your ad, you get highly targeted traffic from this.

There are no fixed rules of effective banner ads campaign.You have to learn the program works best for you by trialand error. The principal idea behind any advertisement isto grab viewers' attention, ignite their curiosity andmotivate them to act. For banner ads it is no different!

The following tips should help you getting better resultfrom your banner advertisement campaign:

1. Choose an attention grabbing content. Space is solimited in a banner - same like newspaper headlines - youhave to come up with something that really gets viewer'sattention. Since you have to do it in one or two sentences,try using something funny, outrageous but intriguing. You can also use pictures, which deliver similar effect.

2. Call to an action. Many people like to be guided. Tellthem what to do such as "Click here" or "Go to the website".

3. Focus on one offer. Your banner ad should carry onesingle message. By including several offers in one ad,chances are you will confuse viewers rather than intrigue.

4. Make it readable. Even a greatly designed banner willfail to motivate a viewer if the text on it is not readable.

5. Avoid information overload. Too many pictures, colorsand texts make banners look clumsy. Viewers tend to ignorethis type of banners. Animated banners should have less thanfour frames.

6. Don't use heavy banners. Make sure that your banner filesize is less than 5K. Bigger files take longer time to load.

7. Test your banners before publishing. Check how yourbanners will look with different browsers. Verify that thebanner link URL is correct and linked to the right page onyour website. Whenever, you make changes to your website,make sure to double check your banner ads.

Recent practice shows that a banner, which looks like a texthas 4 times more click through rate than a conventional banner.So use text banners to increase efficiency of your bannerad program.

Since advertisement is the main source of income for manywebsites banner ads are here to stay. Although, there is nodoubt that their look and use will constantly be evolved.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and presentCEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, hehas wide experience in Business Consulting, InternationalTrade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplacewith solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com,http://ezine.rusbiz.com