Once you’ve decided to promote your website through online advertising, there is a wide array of options available: tile ads, banner ads, skyscraper ads, page-peel ads, rich media ads, video ads, etc. How do you know what all these are and which to use?
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is a wonderful resource on all the basics of online advertising, including examples and guidelines for different types of ads. They also conduct research into what type of online advertising works and in what situation.
If you are just starting out in advertising online, then I suggest a banner or skyscraper ad on websites which are important to your audience. Good places to look are association or publications for your particular industry – remember to look for what your customers read, not necessarily what you read. In order to properly track the effectiveness of the ads, I suggest creating a unique landing page on your website for each ad you have. This will allow you to track from your analytics program how many people click on the ad and make it to your website.
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For those who are more adventurous or willing to spend more money, rich media ads (ads with audio, video or interaction) can be extremely effective in capturing your audience’s attention. There is a wide variety of rich media ads – the IAB has some rich media guidelines to help. You’ll need a Flash or Rich Media Developer to create the ad – make sure they follow the specs for the website on which the ad will be posted (rich media ads with their added interaction can become quite large in file size and time for visitors to download. Try to keep your message to the point).
I’ll cover more about measuring advertising and specific ad examples in future posts.
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