Banner advertising is an effective way of getting your advertising message seen on the Internet. Banner ads should not be your only online form of advertising, but they are an essential part of your online advertising mix. This article assumes that the reader knows what a banner ad looks like, but do you know how they work, and how you can derive benefit from them? Let's define a few terms before answering these questions.

1. "Page views" or "page impressions." These terms are interchangeable and they refer to the number of times that a page within a website has been displayed on a website.

2. "Banner view." Like a page view, a banner view is the number of times that a banner has been displayed on website.

3. "Click through." A click through is the number of times a website visitor has "clicked" on a particular banner ad and was transferred to the website of the banner advertiser.

4. "CTR." CTR is the acronym for "click through rate," which is the ratio of the number of banner view versus the number of times visitors have "clicked through" to your website. CTR is expressed as a percentage, so a click through rate of 1% means that for every 1,000 banner views, 10 visitors have clicked through to your site.

5. "CPM." CPM is an acronym for "cost per M," where "M" is the ancient Roman numeral for 1,000. Translation: CPM is the price your business will pay to have its banner advertisement displayed 1,000 times on a website, e.g, the cost of 1,000 banner views. So, for example, if the CPM to advertise on a site is $80.00 your business will pay $80.00 for every 1,000 banner views.

6. "ROS." ROS is the acronym for "run of site," which simply means that a banner ad is displayed on every page in a website, as opposed to being displayed only in a particular category of a website or only when a particular keyword is entered into a search engine.

Everyone who is in charge of a advertising or marketing department (that's you if you're the sole shareholder of the company) knows that advertising is, in large part, a numbers game. The more frequently your message is seen or heard, the more likely the consumer is to purchase your service or product. Take Mattress Mac with Gallery Furniture , for example. If you live in the Houston area, or if your radio can pick up the signal of almost any Houston area radio station, you cannot go a single day without hearing or seeing an advertisement for Gallery Furniture. Peppering your senses with constant reminders that "Gallery Furniture Saves You Money!" has enabled Mr. McIngvale to build his single location furniture store into an empire. (Of course, advertising alone won't do it; you still must have a quality product or service).

I have no scientific data to support this assertion, but I'll make it anyway: I'm willing to bet that Gallery Furniture is known to more people in the greater Houston area than any other single business. How did that come to be? Mattress Mac understands the advertising numbers game and plays it better than anybody else. Banner ads are a numbers game. The industry standard click through rate for online advertising in general is around .5%. Not 5%, but .5%. Doesn't sound very encouraging for your banner ad campaign, eh? Well, there are ways to significantly increase the CTR of any given banner. The best way is by targeting a particular banner ad to a narrow audience, an audience that is looking specific for a product or service just like yours. Highly-targeted can boost your CTR to as much as 2%-3% or higher and significantly increase the traffic to your website. Another valuable purpose of the banner ad is branding.

Intertwined with the messages Gallery Furniture delivers about particular sales events or types of furniture is the company's consistent and recognizable logo, color scheme, and tag lines. Your banner advertisements can, and should, perform the same function; they should be designed using your company's logo and colors, at a minimum. Sometimes incorporating the tag line is the way to go, but other times you may want to advertise a particular special offer, product, etc. The important thing is that you take advantage of the numbers game by continually displaying your name, logo, and colors. The more visitors that see you, the more they will come to associate your name with your type of product or service, and the more likely they will be in the future to buy from you.
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Google dikenal sebagai search engine yang paling banyak digunakan orang di internet. Darimana google mendapatkan penghasilan sehingga bisa menjadi salah satu perusahaan besar di dunia? tentunya dari pendapatan iklan yang dipasang di website google. Belum banyak yang tahu bahwa selain layanan pencarian situs internet, google juga memiliki layanan yang lain yaitu adwords.

Adwords adalah layanan google yang digunakan oleh pemasang iklan. Pada saat ada orang mencari situs tertentu dengan mengetikkan suatu keywords, maka selain ditampilkan daftar website yang berkaitan dengan keyword tersebut, di samping sebelah kanan ditampilkan pula iklan adwords yang juga berkaitan dengan keyword yang diketik tadi. Iklan yang cukup sederhana ini, karena hanya berisi text & link tanpa gambar, ternyata sangat efektif. Si pencari informasi merasa bahwa adwords adalah bagian dari informasi yang dicarinya karena selain memang berhubungan dengan yang dicarinya, tampilannya mirip dengan hasil pencarian biasa yang diberikan google. Pengunjung yang mungkin tertarik dengan adwords tersebut bisa mengklik dan dibawalah menuju situs si pemasang iklan.

Tarif iklan di adwords dinyatakan dalam CPC = Cost per Click, yaitu jumlah yang dibayar tiap kali ada yang mengklik iklan tersebut. Besarnya sangat relatif, tergantung dari keywords apa yang ingin dipasang, ada keyword yang berharga $0,1 per klik ada pula yang sampai $30. Semakin banyak suatu keywords dicari orang akan semakin banyak pula pemasang iklan yang berlomba memasangnya di google, supaya bisa ditampilkan di urutan paling atas maka pemasang iklan berani membayar paling mahal diantara pemasang iklan lain dengan keyword yang sama.

Kelebihan layanan adwords dibandingkan iklan konvensional adalah

• Iklan yang ditampilkan lebih mencapai target, yaitu hanya ditampilkan kepada orang yang memang mebutuhkannya. Misalnya ada pengunjung yang hendak mencari komputer yang murah misalnya, maka ia akan mengetik keywords “cheap computer”, klik tombol search dan tampillah daftar situs yang berhubungan dengan cheap computer plus iklan adwords yang menawarkan komputer dengan harga murah. Bila pengunjung memang bermaksud membeli komputer kemungkinan besar ia akan mengklik iklan adwords tersebut. Bandingkan dengan iklan banner atau pop up yang kadang menjengkelkan muncul kepada semua orang tidak perduli ia membutuhkan atau tidak.
• Pemasang iklan hanya membayar ke google apabila ada orang yang mengklik iklan adwords yang dipasangnya, jadi walaupun ditampilkan seribu kali tapi bila tidak ada yang mengklik iklan tersebut, tidak perlu bayar. Bandingkan dengan pasang iklan di surat kabar yang tarifnya perhari tak perdulli apakah ada orang yang melihat iklan tersebut atau tidak. Pemasang iklan juga bisa mengatur berapa budget harian untuk suatu iklan sehingga tidak akan membayar melebihi budget yangtelah ditetapkan.
• Pangsa pasar yang luas dan tertarget, adwords bisa disetting untuk ditayangkan ke seluruh dunia atau hanya di negara tertentu, atau bahkan di kota tertentu. Jadi kalau iklan tersebut hanya menjual produk di Indonesia saja maka tidak perlu ditampilkan di negara lain, atau sebaliknya bisa ditampilkan di semua negara jika ingin produk tersebut go internasional.
• Fitur lainnya seperti memantau statistik iklan yang dipasang seputar berapa kali iklan ditampilkan, berapa kali diklik, secara harian atau bulanan dll. sehingga bisa dipantau seberapa efektif iklan yang dipasang. Jika dirasakan kurang kita bisa merubah settingnya supaya lebih efektif lagi.

Untuk memiliki account adwords sangat mudah, syaratnya harus mempunyai kartu kredit untuk pembayaran. Google akan mengenakan biaya sekitar Rp.50ribu untuk biaya setup awal account dan selanjutnya pembayaran tergantung jumlah klik dari iklan yang dipasang. Sekali mempunyai account adwords pemasang iklan bebas membuat iklan sebanyak yang ia inginkan.

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1. Google's Heat Map really does work and deserves the full attention of those who've ignored it. It's really helped me improve my CTR. https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html&gsessionid=HyRs2QlabOI

2. When it comes to content, take the time write the best article you can. Don't write a bunch of rehashed garbage that's already been copied 100x before by lazier webmasters then you. Write something fresh and recent with new sources. Also, don't make the article short just because you don't like to write. Write until you've exhausted the subject. This will help you avoid duplicate content penalities, increase the stickyness to your site, and put out more 3,4,5, etc. keyword combinations that you can pick up traffic on.

3. Clear off the clutter, eye candy, bells and whistles and unnecessary links from each page. You want visitor's eyeballs to focus on 2 things: Your Content and Your Ads. Trimming the fat also reduces the low value places for visitors to go. You want them to either continue surfing your site or to exit through an ad. I've reduced the clutter and low value links off many of my pages which really helped my CTR and proved to be worth the time it took.

One Final Note: I think it's okay for members to repeat tips as it validates the importance of such tips and shows some priority as to what publishers can focus on.
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Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.
When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site.
Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.
It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:

Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.
Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.
Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric,
Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.
We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.
We appreciate your patience.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.
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