It is time to jump start your traditional business by setting up a website to bring the new internet set of customers to your store. Purchasing a website is only the beginning. There are many thousands already. There has to be a way to attract business to your website out of all the many other websites. Happily, there is a way and you have probably seen it many times without understanding it. One of the more popular ways to attract new customers is with Banner Advertising. Advertising Banners are those colorful, active, bits of information that appear across the top of whatever site you were visiting. You see them everywhere; across your email site, on news sites, flashing across the informational site you visited and on the map sites.

Each time you see an advertising banner and actually click on it to find out more, you are immediately bounced to the website run by the owner. That was the whole object of the banner. In the world of banner advertising there are some new assortments of words with different meanings than you are used to.

For starters, HITS refers to the number of times a website has been seen. This is important, because hits cost the advertiser money. The cost is measured in hits per thousand, CPM. Each hit cost a few cents, but for every one thousand (M from the old Roman numeral system) times a person CLICKS on the Banner, the advertiser could be paying out 15.00. To follow this line of thought a bit further, the estimated actual sales from the one thousand hits can be a low as one sale. The advertising for that sale would have 15.00 added to the overhead expense. This is a rather high cost per sale and it could be even higher, depending on the CPM rate.

A HIT could also be termed a PAGE VIEW. A more accurate term for the number of times the click brings a viewer to the website.

Embedded in the banner are COOKIES that make it possible to track the actual number of sales that resulted from this advertising banner. No one likes the idea of being spied upon, but cookies are so much a part of the internet that they are here to stay. Advertisers need cookies to decide the best use of their hard earned dollars. Advertisers want to get the best, most compelling banner for their money. They have choices of Run of Site ROS banner advertising (cost less) or a more targeted approach. Targeted can be that the banner pops up whenever a KEYWORD is entered. The more targeted the keyword is, the higher the cost. ROS refers to the banner running on the website with no keyword target. A keyword can be general; i.e. football, or specific, Detroit Lions football.

The term CREATIVE refers to the actual graphics on the advertising banner. These may be animated, multi-colored, but are limited to a 468 x 60 pixel size, with a file size of 12K to 16K pixels. This is an international standard.

About the Author

Mark Edelson writes articles for Banner advertising. Other articles written by the author related to banners, search engine banner advertising can be found on the net.