Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is all about gaining attention. Companies want to make their banner ads stand out and appeal to the people reading the information on the host site and encourage them to "click-through" to the advertiser's site. Each time a page containing an ad is viewed, that is called an "impression." According to Scrub the Web, "Minimum ROS [Run of Site] Order: 50,000. Impressions; $360.00."

Below is an example of a banner ad for Wikipedia.




My personal experiences with banners are pretty typical. If I am on a high-quality website that I trust and I see banner ads that are relevant to me, I am somewhat likely to click-through. However, if I'm on some shady site that I don't normally frequent and there is a poor-quality banner ad, I will never click through. Alternatively, I will not click on a banner ad if I don't know what the ad is actually advertising.

A banner ad is effective and will make me click through when I am actually interested in the product or company and the ad is well done. I am likely to notice ads that are colored differently from the rest of the page.



I think that the Career Builder skyscraper banner to the left is well done. You know what it is for and where it will take you. It is bright and colorful. It is humorous because of the monkey ~ no one wants to do monkey's work!




I think the ad to the right, although not technically banner sized, is bad. I don't know what the company or product is. It seems pointless. That is something I would never click on.


Banner blindness is the phenomena in which readers looking at a web page rarely look at ads or anything looking like ads. We mentally block them out so it makes it that much harder to gain an audience.