Banner Ads & Rich Media
Display adverting is great if you are looking to make your online presence felt and don't care much about ROI and CTR then you could go for Banner Ads or opt for Rich Media Ads. But if you're a small business and more often than not you're budget will be tight - display advertising is not what you're looking for.
Display advertising is growing again with a 31% year-on-year increase. Banners, skyscrapers and embedded rich media (including video) have grown by 45% (Source: IAB).
The Cost per Accusation (CPA's) of display ads are usually much higher than those of contextual ads. Let me give you an example we used to have CPA of around $0.40 for contextual ads while the display ads were around $1.00.
Of course this has lot to do with design, structure & format of your ad, what you're advertising and your target audience. It might work with your business. You can always give it a try - optimize and see if it works for you.
Banner Ads
Banner ads are the graphical banner's across the web page linked to the advertisers website. Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined fixed set of sizes for such adverts, this makes it easier for sites to sell advertising and for advertisers to publish ads of fixed sizes. Banner ads could prove to be a costly and usually are charged through Cost per Thousand Impression (CPM).
During the nineties investment in banner ads made sense. However the CTR's of banners have considerably gone down thus making investment in banner ads hard to justify. Unless you are large organization and are very keen on branding I will not advice you to go for banner ads, visitors usually give them a blind eye.
Rich Media Advertising.
Over the years, as our Internet connections got faster, the kind of media that has been displayed through Web-based advertising has grown richer. Double Click (largest Internet ad serving agency, now owed by Google) defines rich media as "online advertising technologically enhanced by motion, sound, video or some sort of interactive element". It's about bringing interactivity within your ads - through audio, video and animation without effecting the page load time.
We now spend more time online than in front of their TV - that's a loss of market for the advertiser's. So they follow where their potential audience. Rich media is designed to do all the things that television advertising does. It intrusive, but it also allows users to control the experience. Like when a page load users could view a video ad (with audio turned off, and if the ad appeals to them then they could turn the audio on), interact with the ad to get more information, click-through to advertiser's website, increase it's size and so on.
Some of the most popular types of Rich Media are:
Video - As more and more people have broadband, running videos within banners or within the site makes sense.
Overlays - They run transparently on top of content pages.
Expendables - A banner that expands out when the user brings their mouse cursor over it.
Interstitials - Full-page ads displayed before the content of a page loads.
Transaction Banners - Allows one to do their e-commerce transactions straight form the banner -e.g.- check & book their flight.
Videos are popular everywhere, news sites are adding video reports as supplements to their traditional print stories and in turn charging more to the advertisers. Have a look at the ads that appear before the video news on Cnn.com, they are usually fortune 1000 companies. Advertisers, in turn, are attracted to online video because they are in familiar terrain and their videos can be shown to targeted segments.
Rich media campaigns are significantly more expensive to develop and launch than their non-rich media counterparts. But advertisers (most of them are fortune 1000 companies) have been willing to invest in Rich Media ads because of the higher CTR compared to its predecessor (banner) and they help in maintaining their brand visibility. Rich media requires additional bandwidth and functionality than the regular banner ad.
Some Advertising Networks for Display Advertising:
1) Google Adwords - DIY approach from Google AdWords is best place to start. Your ads would be displayed on their content network. As Google Search only shows contextual ads and sometimes - click to play video.
2) Microsoft AdCenter
3) Social Networks ( Like Facebook, MySpace)
4) Advertising.com
5) Blue Lithium
6) eType - Europe, USA
7) Value Click
8) 24 /7 Real Media
9) Right Media
The advertising networks have channels where they display your ads - either Run of Network (RON) - where your ads may appear on any pages of sites within their publisher networkk or Premium Channel - where you can select industry or categories of site where you want your ad to be displayed. The CPM rates of Run on Network are less than those of Premium Channel - but then they are more targeted.
[NOTE - Bargain CPM rates with network agencies, the rate quoted to you would be much higher than the final rate offered!]