Banner advertising is an effective way of getting your advertising message seen on the Internet. Banner ads should not be your only online form of advertising, but they are an essential part of your online advertising mix. This article assumes that the reader knows what a banner ad looks like, but do you know how they work, and how you can derive benefit from them? Let's define a few terms before answering these questions.

1. "Page views" or "page impressions." These terms are interchangeable and they refer to the number of times that a page within a website has been displayed on a website.

2. "Banner view." Like a page view, a banner view is the number of times that a banner has been displayed on website.

3. "Click through." A click through is the number of times a website visitor has "clicked" on a particular banner ad and was transferred to the website of the banner advertiser.

4. "CTR." CTR is the acronym for "click through rate," which is the ratio of the number of banner view versus the number of times visitors have "clicked through" to your website. CTR is expressed as a percentage, so a click through rate of 1% means that for every 1,000 banner views, 10 visitors have clicked through to your site.

5. "CPM." CPM is an acronym for "cost per M," where "M" is the ancient Roman numeral for 1,000. Translation: CPM is the price your business will pay to have its banner advertisement displayed 1,000 times on a website, e.g, the cost of 1,000 banner views. So, for example, if the CPM to advertise on a site is $80.00 your business will pay $80.00 for every 1,000 banner views.

6. "ROS." ROS is the acronym for "run of site," which simply means that a banner ad is displayed on every page in a website, as opposed to being displayed only in a particular category of a website or only when a particular keyword is entered into a search engine.

Everyone who is in charge of a advertising or marketing department (that's you if you're the sole shareholder of the company) knows that advertising is, in large part, a numbers game. The more frequently your message is seen or heard, the more likely the consumer is to purchase your service or product. Take Mattress Mac with Gallery Furniture , for example. If you live in the Houston area, or if your radio can pick up the signal of almost any Houston area radio station, you cannot go a single day without hearing or seeing an advertisement for Gallery Furniture. Peppering your senses with constant reminders that "Gallery Furniture Saves You Money!" has enabled Mr. McIngvale to build his single location furniture store into an empire. (Of course, advertising alone won't do it; you still must have a quality product or service).

I have no scientific data to support this assertion, but I'll make it anyway: I'm willing to bet that Gallery Furniture is known to more people in the greater Houston area than any other single business. How did that come to be? Mattress Mac understands the advertising numbers game and plays it better than anybody else. Banner ads are a numbers game. The industry standard click through rate for online advertising in general is around .5%. Not 5%, but .5%. Doesn't sound very encouraging for your banner ad campaign, eh? Well, there are ways to significantly increase the CTR of any given banner. The best way is by targeting a particular banner ad to a narrow audience, an audience that is looking specific for a product or service just like yours. Highly-targeted can boost your CTR to as much as 2%-3% or higher and significantly increase the traffic to your website. Another valuable purpose of the banner ad is branding.

Intertwined with the messages Gallery Furniture delivers about particular sales events or types of furniture is the company's consistent and recognizable logo, color scheme, and tag lines. Your banner advertisements can, and should, perform the same function; they should be designed using your company's logo and colors, at a minimum. Sometimes incorporating the tag line is the way to go, but other times you may want to advertise a particular special offer, product, etc. The important thing is that you take advantage of the numbers game by continually displaying your name, logo, and colors. The more visitors that see you, the more they will come to associate your name with your type of product or service, and the more likely they will be in the future to buy from you.

Read more!

Search keyword marketing is paid for on the basis of how many people click on your ad, so it's called cost per click, or CPC (also referred to as PPC, or pay per click).

There are other advertising methods as well: CPL (or cost per lead), where you pay for each "lead" or potential customer you get from the ad; and CPA (cost per action), with the action taken by the customer being defined variously as filling out a form or signing up for something. There is also revenue sharing, where the site carrying the ads gets a cut of any purchases made as a result of the ads.

An interesting variant on cost per click is cost per call, a service offered by Yahoo! and AOL that is particularly interesting for very local businesses. In this case, you list not your Web link, but your phone number, and Yahoo! and AOL track the calls you receive through that ad. Obviously, it's also handy for businesses that don't have a Web site at all. How cool is that?

OK, so you pay a cost per click — but what is the cost per click?

Well, that depends on what you're willing to pay, in competition with others. In this market, you are buying the right to have your ad displayed on the search results page generated when somebody has typed a particular keyword or search term into the search engine. Somebody searches on the phrase "life insurance" and, since you sell life insurance, you want your ad to pop up there. So you bid on the term "life insurance" and what you pay depends on what everybody else is bidding.

The minimum bid on Google is 10 cents. On Yahoo! it's 5 cents, but you'll only pay that amount for obscure terms that nobody else wants. Other terms are more expensive — sometimes breathtakingly more expensive: "Delaware incorporation services," for example, costs about $8 per click. The term "merchant accounts" is running about $6 per click at the time of this writing. Certain legal terms and medical terms, linked with diseases that are subjects of class-action lawsuits, can cost as much as $30 per click.

Quite a range! Although none of the major search engines publish averages, the sense of the industry seems to be that typical keyword buyers are paying between a dime and a couple of bucks per click.

Fortunately, you have a lot of control over what you pay. When you bid on keywords, you get a lot of information from Google and Yahoo! about what others are bidding, so you're not bidding blind. You can see which keywords are popular with searchers and which are popular with buyers, and plan accordingly. And of course you can tinker with your keyword purchases to find the best blend of price, response, and final results.
Read more!

Adsense adalah program penyedia iklan dari Google, sebuah search engine ternama. Sebelum membahas adsense, sebaiknya kita mengenal dulu yang namanya adwords. Adwords adalah layanan iklan dari google, bila seorang mencari informasi dari website google, ia akan mengetik suatu keywords tertentu, klik search dan tampillah daftar website yang berhubungan dengan keyword yang diketik tadi. Perhatikan pada sebelah kanan atas dari daftar hasil pencarian tersebut ada beberapa tulisan iklan yang tampil, itulah yang namanya adwords yaitu iklan (ad) yang berupa kata-kata (words). Sangat simple dan sederhana bukan? tapi begitu efektif karena iklan tersebut benar2 mencapai target karena hanya dimunculkan apabila isi iklannya berhubungan dengan keywords yang diketik oleh si pencari informasi. Pemasang iklan harus membayar jumlah tertentu kepada google apabila ada orang yangn men-klik iklannya, dinyatakan dengan CPC = Cost per Click. Besarnya tergantung dari harga sebuah keywords, makin banyak dicari orang biasanya pemasang iklan berani membayar lebih mahal supaya iklannya tampil paling atas di adwords. Inilah yang menjadi sumber pendapatan Google.

Ternyata google tidaklah pelit dan memberi kesempatan bagi para netter, webmaster atau orang yang mempunyai website untuk berbagi “kue” adwords, maka dibuatlah layanan adsense.
Read more!

The listing below provides links to tutorials and tips on submitting your Web site to cost per click (CPC) and pay per click (PPC) search engines and which ones matter the most.

• Pay Per Click Search Engines (CPC/PPC) Helpful listings with information about each one, and includes major pay per click search engines (Google AdWords, Overture), major second tier ppc players (Espotting, FindWhat, LookSmart LookListings), other notable services, and more pay per click resources. [Article/tutorial dated 08/13/2004, by Danny Sullivan Search Engine Watch.]
• Submitting Via Paid Listings: Overture & Google AdWords To gain quick visibility, you might consider going the paid listings route, especially for a new site. This article/tutorial provides some helpful information about it and links to resources, too.

Read more!