Effective Banner Advertising - Part 2

Once you’ve thought about what you want to advertise and you’ve created an eye-catching banner that best represents it, where and how do you place the ad to get the best response?

Banner advertising is a really effective means of promoting estate agent’s services, especially when used on portal websites. ‘Advertise where the people are looking’ is exactly what’s at play in this scenario. The ad becomes even more effective when placed at a granular rather than generic level such as the home page. Placing banners on the search results pages of neighbourhoods where you operate is a key way to attract potential buyers and sellers in your market. Your message should speak directly to the people looking for property in your area and should resonate loudly with those looking to sell. So how do you get your ads up there?

There’s 3 ways of posting banner ads on a site:

1. Work with other advertisers in an ‘exchange program’ where you agree to display their ad on your site if they display yours;
2. Pay a publisher site directly to display your ad; and
3. Pay an organisation, usually a banner network, to display the banner on a number of publisher’s sites.

These three arrangements take many forms and will suit particular advertisers at different times. If you don’t have a whole lot of money to launch a traditional ad campaign you may opt for the ‘Exchange’ idea. You might choose to form your own network of sites with whom you share a particular affinity (perhaps location) and then agree to swap banner ads. This can be a very effective and cheap way of advertising to a localised market - perfect for real estate agents trying to win listings.

If you want to get your ad out there on a lot of sites and for little money you might join a formal Exchange Program. Typically you’ll be asked to post 2 ads on your site for every 1 ad of yours placed elsewhere in the network. This option can get you great coverage for no money but you do give up a lot of control over exactly where your ad is displayed. Most programs will say they try and match advertisers to sites intelligently but occasionally advertisers are unhappy with where their banners end up.

If you’re happy to pay to have your banner published, you can either approach the particular website you’re interested in directly, or you may employ an advertising agenct to handle it for you. If you have a very niche product you may like to go direct to a website to get a better deal. You will typically buy an advertising package on a CPM basis - paying per thousand impressions. This is how most property portals operate their banner advertising packages for member agents.

If you use an agency, they will do most of the work for you and offer many advantages to doing it yourself. From creating the banner to selecting the appropriate sites and negotiating the best price and position for your ad, they will usually get a better deal than you can by yourself because they buy impressions in bulk. One drawback though is that agencies often only deal with accounts of particular size, so if you are a small business you may need to shop around to find an appropriate agency to work with.

Paying a banner ad network is a great way to get your ad onto multiple sites quickly without having to spend time negotiating with each publisher. A banner ad network is basically a broker between the advertiser and the publisher and takes care of all the placement and tracking of your ads; they either work on an impression basis (such as ) or on click-throughs (such as BannerSpace). As with banner exchange programs however, the advertiser relinquishes control over where the ad is placed.

Having great banner creative with a clear message is very important, but it’s no good if noone sees it. Targeted placement is imperative to your banner advertising achieving success. If you wish to place banner ads on a portal website you should contact the site directly and find out about their advertising packages.

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