Online Branding

The purpose of internet advertising is far deeper than just generating traffic to your web site; it is an important part of building your brand. Your main branding goal is to get your name, company or service on the tip of everyone's tongue. How do you do this? By effectively using your logo, signature, web site, newsletter, blog, press releases and social networking software, you present a strong, well-executed persona. Branding is considered one of the most important, though difficult, marketing objectives because it is often the tie-breaker for an unsure consumer. Every object, document or advertisement you display should help consumers associate your name with quality. If you demonstrate a clear, convincing brand image they are more likely to remember you and do business with you in the future.

Collarity

One of the newest trends in Internet Marketing is personalization. The world wide web truly lives up to its name and is often bewildering in its scope. For the average user, such breadth of content is simply too much and even the best attempts by the major search engines have failed to achieve true personalization. The answer is not just in individual understanding of the web but community. That's where Collarity comes in. A combination of local search, community site and grassroots wisdom, Collarity seeks to understand and aid users in their quest for information on the web. More than a search engine, Collarity is a new way to interact with the world. Learn more about how Collarity can help market your brand.

Email Marketing

Email has evolved into a critical element for any search marketing campaign. It can help increase brand awareness, develop ongoing relationships with customers, and help with customer acquisition. But you have to know how to use it. Effective emailing is about knowing the right day to send, who to send to, how to market it, and constantly testing effectiveness and other analytical concerns.

Visit our Email pages to learn how to maximize your email efforts in order to perfect your email copywriting technique and achieve a high response rate for a low cost.

Banner Advertising

Banner ads are an excellent tool for obtaining site recognition and have been used for over a decade. The first banner ad was sold to AT&T on October 27, 1994. The banner size was 468x60 pixels, and it looked like this:

Not exactly a work of art, yet reminiscent of early banner ads that typically said, "click here". Once this ad appeared on HotWired, the site immediately sold ads to Sprint, MCI, Volvo, ZIMA and Club Med. Demand was brewing, and banner ads became the rage by 1997, as many a website sported the 468x60 pixel pennant across the top.

What was amazing about this new form of advertising at the time is that advertisers could get an immediate and direct response. No waiting for phone calls or snail mail to get an order. People could click on an offer and go directly to the source, the advertiser's website.

Need Background Information? - A Brief History on Branding.

Step 0: Determine Need

If you're asking yourself if Branding will help your company achieve its goals, the answer is simple: Yes. Branding enables advertisers to get an immediate and direct response. No waiting for phone calls or snail mail to get an order. People are able to click on an offer and go directly to the source, your web site. More than that, branding solidifies identity and builds community. A visitor might see a banner ad a thousand times. Every time reinforces the brand in their mind, associating your company with a particular time and place.

At first, banner ad spending was concentrated in the high tech industry, which is no surprise since the technology companies knew the most about the Internet. They knew what to expect, understood the risks and were willing to take a gamble. Companies selling servers, software and routers for Internet use knew they had a captive audience for their products because potential buyers would be Internet users. JupiterResearch (formerly Jupiter Communications) reported the following companies among the big spenders in Internet advertising circa 1996: Microsoft, AT&T, Excite, IBM, Netscape, Infoseek, NYNEX, Yahoo!, Lycos and CNET.

The websites attracting the most eyeballs became the top sellers of Internet advertising. They sold ad space on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis. The big seller sites fell into three categories (search engines and directories, Internet information sites and content or publishing sites). Jupiter reported the following companies among the big ad sellers of 1996: Netscape, Yahoo!, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite, CNET, ZDNet, WebCrawler, ESPNET SportsZone and Pathfinder. It didn't take long before the print and TV model of selling aggregate ad space became the norm on the web. Media buyers can buy blocks of sites across similar topics; they can schedule banners to be shown at specific times; they can target racing enthusiasts, auto buyers, home gardeners, pregnant mothers and just about any community group.

Step 1: Planning

Plan Your Ad

In the initial stages of banner design, start by gathering the following information:

• ALT Code string - typically 10 words (40 to 50 characters) describing why a person visits your site and that is displayed in the banner box prior to loading the graphic image. If graphics are disabled, this is the only message your banner gets!
• Concept - what is the image that best conveys what you are offering in the form of meeting a need of the viewer.
• Product - gather various pieces of product information.
• Have a call to action in either words or implied action. For instance, one of our ILE banners causes the person to click on the lower right corner, even though CLICK HERE does not appear on the banner. But nobody would ever click there twice (see below).
• Create a sense of urgency by having a deadline or expiration date.
• If you only want traffic (maybe you sell banner space on your site), identify a "Gift" such as FREE SCREEN SAVER to assist in drawing visitors to your site. They may not visit because of your product, but you do get visitors. But, if you are paying for the site traffic and downloads and uninterested visitors do not generate advantage in any way, make sure that they visit for your content instead of a gift!
• Identify a specific target market to help focus banner ads to sites catering to those prospective clients. The major banner sites charge money, and some are free.
• Test your banners! Make sure that they load from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari browsers. You don't want to miss out on customers simply because of the browser they use.
• Validate the effectiveness of your banners. If you have maximized the message in all of its forms, then measure the click-through rate to establish a statistically valid base. You may test several banners in parallel if the banner service offers the ability to rotate between multiple banners. Change only one thing at a time, then gather statistics to compare it to the base. This is an iterative cycle and, since the Web is so dynamic, it is well worth constant monitoring.

Select Your Tools

Another issue here are the tools used to create banners. The better the tools, the better the banner? To only a certain degree, this is correct. But since the banner is only to be seen for a few seconds, using a 16 color set and straight, easy to read fonts is much more important than artistic rendering or exotic animations.

• Use at least PaintShop 3.11 (16-bit) or 4.x (32-bit). These offer great coloring controls and reasonable bitmap manipulation.
• Use Spinwave JPG & GIF Cruncher to optimize your colors and banner size. This is an interactive Web page that will optimize the image files by offering a selection of color sets (16-color, 24-color, 32-color, 48-color, etc). You may download your reformatted images directly from their Web page.
• It is best that you use The GIF Construction Set to reload the new GIF with fresh images from your library, being sure to map each to the existing colors in the GIFWizard file.

Compute Cost

It's important to know how much you can afford to spend on your banner ads. There are many major sites that have a high CPM (Cost per Thousand, a term carried over from the printed media world). If you know how much money you want to make, and know statistics about your Web page performance (usually takes 30 days to have a valid sampling), then you can compute the number of impressions and the allowable CPM. To compute your target/allowable CPM rate:

Design

Banner design is truly an art. The message is only a part of the trick! The surprise is that beauty has the least impact on click-through rate. Message and action make the greatest impression! With a great banner, you win, and with a good banner you lose, and if it is only average on the Web you don't survive. To be able to attract the right number of visitors to your message (Web page), the banner must be exceptionally effective.

Step 2: Decide Who to Buy From

Normally, advertisers use media buyers through an ad agency to buy banner ads. The media buyer can help plan the campaign based on the advertiser's objectives. A major campaign objective with banners is branding, but they are also used for direct response. Usually, B2B marketers focus on branding, whereas B2C marketers favor direct response. A media buyer or planner will contract with sales representatives from the various websites selling ad space on behalf of an advertiser client. Some banner ads are sold by the page impression; that is, each time a user views one web page, one impression is counted. Prices are quoted by the cost per thousand impressions (CPM). For example, if the CPM for a particular banner ad campaign is $23, then it would cost $2,300 for 100,000 impressions. Two variables affecting CPM rates are site traffic and site demographics: the more popular the selling site, the more expensive the CPM, and the same goes for more valuable demographics.

Banner ads yield two benefits: a click-through to the advertiser's landing page and brand recognition. Each time a prospect clicks on a banner, that click-through is counted. The number of click-throughs is divided by the number of impressions served, providing a click-through rate (CTR). While it is easy to get a measure of banner effectiveness from click-throughs, it is difficult to measure the branding effect. In the early days, clicks were a standard measure of effectiveness; however, the current focus is on conversions rather than clicks as a measure of campaign effectiveness.

Other sites and advertising networks sell banner ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. With this payment model, the advertiser only pays for qualifying clicks to the destination site based on a prearranged per-click rate. Cost-per-click can be seen as a middle ground between paying per impression and paying per action. With CPM pricing, the advertiser assumes the risk of low-quality traffic generated by the publisher. With CPC pricing, the publisher assumes the risk of low-converting offers by the advertiser. With CPC, the publisher does not have to worry about the sales conversion rate of the target site, and the advertiser does not have to worry about how many impressions it takes to attract the specified number of clicks.

Don't Know Where to Advertise? - Bruce Clay Recommended Sites.

Step 3: Construct Campaign

Execution

A banner ad campaign can be planned and executed through an ad agency or directly from an ad network. Ad agencies and networks employ media buyers and media planners who will help plan and execute your banner campaign based on your objectives, which are usually branding or direct response.

Ad networks represent many publisher websites that sell ad space. The sites are usually grouped into categories such as Automotive, Business & Finance, Careers, Children & Family, Computing, Ecommerce & Portals, Games, Health & Fitness, Home & Garden, Movies, Music, News, Reference & Education, Sports and Travel. This allows advertisers to reach broad audiences readily through run-of-category and run-of-network buys.

Advertising networks enable media buyers to efficiently coordinate ad campaigns across dozens, hundreds or thousands of sites. The banner campaigns may involve running ads over a category (run-of-category) or an entire network (run-of-network). Site-specific buys are usually not available when dealing with advertising networks but can be made through an ad agency. Ad networks buy ad space on either a CPM or a CPC basis. A sample of the major impression networks includes: DoubleClick, Flycast, BURST!Media and ContentZone, whereas the click-through networks include Banner Brokers, ValueClick, BannerSpace and eAds.

A key issue for publishers is exclusive vs. non-exclusive representation. Exclusive representation generally brings a higher percentage of revenue sharing, but sometimes results in selling a smaller percentage of ad inventory. In non-exclusive arrangements, publishers can use secondary advertising options to fill the space left unsold by the primary ad network.

Decide Placement

Some banner ads have a permanent spot for a specific period of time (sponsorships), but most banner ads are rotated for maximum reach or targeting. The following terms are useful in describing banner rotations.

Run of site (ROS) is an ad buying option in which ad placements may appear on any pages of the seller site. In run of site advertising, advertisers generally give up placement preferences in return for low rates and a broader reach. Ads can be placed randomly in unsold, less valuable areas of the seller site.

Note that ROS is defined by the seller site, and some sites define it as an option that places your banner ad on the site's most visited pages, giving your ad the widest exposure.

Run of network (RON) is similar to ROS except the ads appear on an individual site instead of the many network sites. Run of category (ROC) is also similar except the ads appear within a specified category within the ad network.

Size Matters

The banner ad is a staple on the web because it is easy to understand. One of the first steps after its debut was banner standardization. While standards were first proposed and developed by the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and CASIE (Coalition for Advertising Supported Information and Entertainment), the current standards are set forth by the IAB as shown below. Note that the original 468x60 banner still lives.

Step 4: Obtain Maximum Visibility - Going Beyond the Banner with Sponsorships

Sponsorships originated in offline advertising and have been around for a long time. Many years ago, most TV shows had only one sponsor. Few may remember Dinah Shore singing, "See the USA in your Chevrolet..." or Uncle Milty (Milton Berle) shilling for Texaco (and subsequently Buick), but that's the way it was done before the 30-second spot came to dominate.

The sponsorship idea is to connect a brand with a popular TV show or a sporting event to appeal to a group of fans or aficionados. Marketing research firm Dynamic Logic defines a sponsorship as "...a marketing effort where the objective is to connect a brand with a separate and identifiable event, person, place, content area or promotion."

Sponsorships can help achieve maximum visibility beyond banners on the Web, and that is why publisher sites offer various different sponsorship options. Quicken surveyed advertisers from financial services, telecommunications and e-commerce, reporting the following reasons for using sponsorships:

Sponsorships can go beyond the banner to provide maximum visibility for highly sought information made available to design engineers and managers. Different sponsorship levels can be offered to fit any budget or reach any target audience, including a run-of-site (ROS) top-page or right-panel banner in several standard IAB size, or a large rectangle ad displayed only on the homepage.

Need More Sponsorship Information? - Sponsorship Campaign Effectiveness

Step 5: Monitor Your Ad

This is critical. A mere tenth of a percentage point drop in any category means that you are losing money. It is critical that trends are measured, understood, and that the program be able to be adjusted seven days a week to meet the needs of the company. Since the percentages are extremely important to the success of your program, constant monitoring and critical analysis is vital to the success of your program. This is why a good analytics program is absolutely imperative. To learn more about analytics, visit our Web Analytics section.