Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is the placement of graphical ads - images, animations or videos - on other people's websites. It is the best-known part of display advertising and is billed, depending on the contract, per thousand impressions, per click or per completed action. The first web banner went live in 1994.

What is a banner ad?

Banner advertising has existed since the early nineties. It is part of what is called display advertising - online advertising that uses formats such as videos, images or animations. Animated ad or static graphic, it makes no difference: advertising with banners is, alongside good content and SEO, the most widely used way of winning new visitors. Banner advertising has become impossible to imagine the web without. For webmasters it is an important source of income, and advertisers can use banners to put their message in front of the right target audience.

Probably the best-known provider of display advertising is Google's Display Network. Graphics, images or videos can be uploaded there and shown on participating websites. One of the advantages of the Display Network is that various metrics can be measured. An important figure here is the click through rate (CTR). It relates the number of impressions of a banner to its clicks. The CTR - also called the click rate - is given as a percentage.

A short history of banner advertising

The first online banner ad went live in 1994 and, with a click rate of an incredible 44 %, was a massive success. The banner - a simple, static .jpg with a black background - advertised the telecoms provider AT&T and was shown on hotwired.com. It carried a simple, clear advertising message in the style of the nineties: "Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE?" - "YOU WILL!" - nothing more. All of it worked without an ad server, of course, and was placed on the page manually. That simple but hugely successful ad started the era of banner advertising.

Banners quickly became more colourful, the formats more animated, more varied and more individual. New formats appeared and marketing companies specialised in creating and managing banner advertising. Demand exploded, not least with the boom around the dot-com bubble. Around the turn of the millennium a large number of big and small companies relied on banner creatives for their online advertising. Affiliate networks adopted the new advertising method - banner advertising counted as exotic, modern and was hyped. Even then, click rates in the low single-digit percentage range were not unusual.

Display advertising is a billion-euro industry today and keeps growing. Within it, however, classic banner advertising has been losing influence for a while. One reason is the increasing use of ad blockers such as NoScript or AdBlock Plus. Against the general trend, video advertising and moving-image formats such as HTML5 have gained reach and influence.

Some banner formats nevertheless experienced a revival. .GIF graphics had been written off as outdated many years ago. With the rise of meme culture they became relevant again and are now impossible to imagine Web 2.0 without. The same happened to scalable vector graphics (.SVG), which gained a lot of ground again with the arrival of 4K displays and mobile devices.

Banner design - what should a banner look like?

There are a few important things to keep in mind when designing a banner ad. As a general rule, the design must not make false or empty promises. A click on a banner ultimately means only one thing: the visitor is interested and gives the landing page their trust. If that visitor is to be won over, the advertiser has to repay that trust. Visitors usually only stay when the website or landing page covers the same topic and builds on the advertiser's ad.

Whether banner advertising should be plain or animated and loud depends on the audience and the message. In heavily contested markets it can make sense to run animated banner ads. With animated banners in particular the advertiser has to ask themselves about the goal: what is the campaign supposed to say? An ad always has to carry a clear message. An ad that flashes wildly and contains lots of information, by contrast, often has a poor click rate. It looks untrustworthy and overwhelms the visitor. A banner must never feel cluttered.

Very important: the campaign has to contain a so-called call to action (CTA). A call to action is a prompt aimed at the visitor of the website. Banner advertising should always involve the visitor actively. A simple example:

Banner formats - which size works best?

It is a misconception that the success of a banner depends on its size. Large formats do have one decisive advantage, of course: they can grab the attention of the target audience and therefore have greater reach. But large creatives can also be perceived as intrusive, and an appealing design is harder to achieve on a big canvas. That is why intelligently placed and discreet ads are often the better option. An overview of common formats:

Leaderboard

Size: 728 × 90 pixels
Characteristics: the big brother of the full size banner. Usually placed in the upper third of the page and also known as the super banner.

Full size banner

Size: 468 × 60 pixels
Characteristics: the classic among banner ads, very widely used.

Half size banner

Size: 234 × 60 pixels
Characteristics: the little brother of the full size banner. Its reduced width makes it flexible to place.

Rectangle

Size: 180 × 150 pixels
Characteristics: often placed inside the body text.

Skyscraper

Size: 120 × 600 pixels
Characteristics: vertical orientation. Usually placed at the edge of the page.

Wallpaper

Size: individual
Characteristics: used on the background of the website. Has a strong presence and is used for site branding.

Running banner advertising - the key metrics

Anyone running banner advertising should be familiar with the terms cost per mille (CPM) and cost per click (CPC). Both are the most important billing models in display advertising. Beyond them there are further metrics, such as cost per lead (CPL).

Cost per mille (CPM)

CPM is billed by the number of impressions. If the CPM of a banner is € 2.00, then € 2.00 is paid per thousand impressions of that banner. With a high click rate, CPM has clear advantages for the advertiser. If the click rate is low, however, it can get expensive quickly. With CPM billing the banner therefore has to be well positioned and the attention of the visitor has to be there. In German the same model is called Tausender-Kontakt-Preis (TKP).

Cost per click (CPC)

CPC billing is self-explanatory: you pay per click, not per impression. CPC counts as the more precise billing method, because payment only happens when a click actually occurs. What CPC does not take into account is whether a lead results at the end.

Cost per lead (CPL)

An even more precise model is CPL (cost per lead). Payment happens as soon as a visitor has clicked and performed an action on the page - billing therefore follows the conversion rate directly. The action is freely definable. It can be a sign-up, taking part in a survey or filling in a form. CPL gives the advertiser certainty in budget planning: they only pay when the result has been achieved. The webmaster, in turn, has hardly any planning certainty under this model and should work with ads that are placed as well and as visibly as possible.

Further tips for banner advertising

Banner generator - create banners for free

Anyone who is less creative or has no experience with image editing software can commission a designer to build a set of creatives. There are, however, a number of free tools on the web with which banner ads can easily be built yourself. A banner generator is well suited for first steps in display advertising. Modern banner generators are cloud-based and offer an impressive repertoire. With their help, attractive ads can be designed quickly and free of charge. How much traffic a banner brings in the end is not decided by the tool, though, but by placement and message.

Advertisers who go it alone should always keep their own marketing and advertising know-how in view. A specific goal has to be pursued. At a later point, or when there is more advertising budget in play, the creatives (images, graphics, videos, text) are best produced by a web designer. They usually know what works well and what works less well for a given goal.

Creating banners for YouTube

YouTube belongs to Google and is one of the largest search engines in the world. There is hardly anything you cannot find a tutorial for on YouTube. The platform records more than two billion video views every day. Webmasters should therefore have a presence there. Your own YouTube channel creates a lot of response and helps address a broad audience. Every video can be given its own banner ad. That ad appears as a thumbnail and announces the video in YouTube search, for example.

Every YouTube video should always carry a matching, individual banner ad as a thumbnail. The ad has to express clearly and directly what information the video conveys and what the viewer gains from watching it. It should never be abused for clickbait or cheap effect. That method is widespread on YouTube, but it casts a very bad light on the website and the channel. Clickbait ultimately only aims at a few extra clicks and is never a way to win returning visitors.