Banner ads are rectangular images on websites that lead to the advertiser’s site when clicked. They can be interactive with animation, video, and audio. Banner ads use text or sound to prompt clicks and engage viewers. They are a major component of online advertising and can be used in link exchanges or pay-per-click models.
A banner ad is a rectangular image on a website that acts as a portal to the advertiser’s site when clicked. While the original banner ads featured little more than images and text, many of today’s banner ads are interactive, with flash animation, video, and audio to grab your audience’s attention. These ads are a major component of online co-op advertising and “pay-per-click” advertising, which is unique to the Internet.
A banner ad may use text or sound to prompt the audience to click or “roll over” it to make changes to the ad’s animation. For example, some ads invite the viewer to click on a moving target or answer a trivial question, thus engaging the viewer to play a game within the ad. Moving banner ads, which scroll across the screen to grab the viewer’s attention and obstruct the viewer’s view of the web browser, often hog bandwidth and are sometimes deliberately difficult for the viewer to close. These types of ads are generally seen as a form of annoying, if not unethical, web advertising.
Along with direct mail, pop-up ads, and plain text hyperlinks, banner advertising is one of the major advertising models implemented by websites looking to advertise their products or services online. Websites that want to use these ads have the option of participating in a link exchange with other websites that generate the type of traffic they want their site to receive. For example, a web design firm and a technology writer may agree to host a banner ad for each other on their respective sites. Examples of cooperative advertising where two competing websites participate in an ad exchange, such as a web designer hosting an ad for another web designer.
Pay-per-click advertising is a popular pricing model for banner ads. With pay-per-click advertising, the website hosting the ad doesn’t charge the ad owner for the number of people who see the ad, also known as impressions, but rather for the number of times viewers do click on the banner ad, known as a click-through. This way, the banner owner only pays for traffic to their own website, and any lost traffic to the host site is compensated by the ad owner’s payment.
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