startup hustle

Have you started your 2008 Marketing Plan yet? If you are lucky enough to actually have a marketing budget, you need to plan where to spend it. Most startups do not bother with such nonsense, there are more important tasks to complete. It is nice to have an established (working) plan so you can see the differences as the year progresses. Where should you spend that marketing money?

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Have you thought of using banner ads in your marketing? Ad blindness (aka banner blindness) is becoming an increasing issue for advertisers. Think of Times Square (on the left), do you really get anything from all of those billboards, or do you just ignore them?

When marketing on the internet, banner ads are a common medium for sites that are trying to reach a target market. Ads are often in the same positions on the majority of sites. This makes it simple for people to ignore banner ads. Are banner ads worth the cost when ad blindness is an issue?

For example, you decide to post a banner ad on a Blog A. Of course the cost varies, most often on the traffic stats of the publishing site. You eagerly watch your analytics for the traffic and conversions. After a month the blog owner is ready to sign you up for the next month, but after looking at your stats you are hesitant. Were your expectations to high? Was Blog A the best site to advertise on?

I often evaluate the effectiveness of banner ads as if they are pay per click ads. I compare the cost per click of the ads (total clicks / month ad cost) as well as the number of conversions. The most common result is a banner ad that is competitive in the cost per click, often slightly higher, but low conversions. This draws the conclusion that ad blindness is not as prevalent as reports indicate.

Maybe banners ads are not a conversion generating advertising medium.

Did you ever think of banner ads as brand advertising? Your logo displayed on a market relevant blog could insinuate quality. The question I often ask is what do internet users perceive of the ads on a site. If you deem a site as quality, do you consider the sites that advertise to be quality as well? Are companies that advertise on Techcrunch better than companies that advertise on StartupSquad?

Banner Ads could be a “safe” version of text ads.

Now that Google is trying to reduce paid text links, banner ads might help get the PageRank pushed through to your site. Just make sure that you negotiate the removal of the nofollow tag.

There is not a defined answer of how well banner ads will work in your marketing mix. Like all aspects of internet marketing, testing is necessary. Let us know how banner ads have working for your site.