Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing business
on the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day brick
and mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more dramatic
and may have greater impact than in a conventional business.
Success in this climate can only come from quick response to the
changes. Look at web advertisement! Just in a few short years,
we have seen rise and fall of banner advertisement, email
marketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number of other marketing
tools.

Consider banner advertisement. In the beginning of Internet era,
banner advertisement was one of the primer methods of online
marketing. There were not many quality sites in those days. In
search of good feature and content filled websites visitors
were clicking through banners aggressively. Today, things are
totally different! Over using of banners on the web pages
forced to train our eyes not to notice banners any more.
Visitors tend to avoid clicking through the banners unless
there is a very compelling reason to do so. Does that mean
the banner advertisement is dead? Not so soon!

Although, banner click through rate is quite low in comparison
to what it used to be, depending on your objectives banner
advertisement can still be very effective. Banner ads are
used today, either for creating brand recognition or for
bringing in more traffic to the website and consequently
generating more sales.

Brand recognition

As an overall brand awareness campaign, companies place
banners on targeted websites.

Banners of products with mass appeal are frequently posted
on high traffic portals. If your goal is to make any of your
products or services popular to certain niche market, you
should find websites catering this particular audience and
post banner ads. When visitors see your banners, whether
they click on it or not – same like traditional bill boards
and TV advertisements – it helps you building consciousness
to your brand.

According to a recent study, online banner ads can be as
effective as television advertising as far as brand
recognition is concerned. A survey was conducted among
members of American Online who saw an ad of a product
as a banner on the website and on TV commercial. The
result indicated that 40 percent of the audience remembers
the static banners and 41 percent remembers the TV
commercial at the time of the poll conducted a few days
later.

Forester Research claims that you can get similar brand
recognition effect from online ad campaign in comparison
to traditional forms of advertisements for around 60
percent less cost. However, same like offline ads, in
order to create a sustainable brand recognition, your
online advertisement campaign also needs to run for a
prolong period of time.