Banner advertising in the online advertising arena has emerged as a major tool to bring your product to the attention of people who might go on to form the prospective consumer base of the product. Online banner ads, therefore, are nothing but texts or animations about the product that are embedded in websites or specific web pages in the form of a banner containing the information about the product.

What these banner ads basically do is attract the web page surfer's attention and then lead him to click on that banner which will in turn lead him to the website of the company which makes the product. Alternatively, clicking on the banner may also lead the surfer to the product description page directly. These banners come in packages of 100,000 impressions costing between 20 to 100 dollars per thousand impressions. The entire online advertising medium is measured per thousand impressions. Impressions is different from Unique visitors. If a visitor clicks around your site and navigates to several different pages, that is only one unique visitor, but may be multiple page impressions depending on how many pages they visit.

Under the traditional setup of advertising, marketing and advertising campaigns were designed keeping in mind the demographics of the target audience, that is to say, their gender, their age group, their income, etc. with the innovations entering the field of advertising, especially so with online advertising, a target customer base can easily be made available through certain sites. Some sites, for example, are thronged mostly by young people, some by real estate agents, and so on. Therefore, if any one of these groups is your target consumer then you simple need to place your banner on sites that interest that specific group.

The following are some tips that will enable you to conduct a smooth online banner ad campaign:

• Instead of placing the banner on the home page of a website, placing it on one of the sub-links will actually give you a much targeted audience. You will not be wasting impression on people who would as it is not be interested.

• Design your banners carefully. Do not reveal too much in the banner otherwise people will not click on it to find out more

• The size of the banner must be kept between 5 and 20K. It is just possible that the banner may not load as quickly as the rest of the page and your target customer has moved on to the next page.

• Animated banners always attract more attention than static banners

• Use the ALT attribute for those people who turn the images off while surfing

• Use catchy phrases to lead people into clicking on the link. The most common ones are "click here", "find out more", etc.

• Finally, keep revising your banner content according to the kind of response you receive.

Properly researched and placed banner ads are highly effective. They are effective in branding a company name as well as driving highly targeted traffic to your site