The first section of this topic concerns those that wish to run adverts on their website (and those that do not want to run adverts on their website). If you are thinking of advertising on other websites, the first section will give you some insight as to what your advertising budget will bring you. The second section will help you choose the best places for your ads.

Running adverts on your website.

The major common pitfalls in running banners on your website are:

1) Design issues. This is possibly the quickest way to destroy the work of a great graphic designer. The designer, like most artists, knows how to draw the viewers eye to the focal point, whatever that may be on your page. One ill-placed banner in a splash of colours can have a profound detrimental effect on your page. It may get more click throughs, but at the expense of your own site content.

2) Secondary servers. If the banner is hosted on a secondary server and that server is down, it can cause your page loading to "hang". In extreme cases, as with Netscape Navigator 4+ it can prevent your page loading at all and instead open the default page at the secondary server. If you want to see this in action (with your NN4+ browser) click the following link

 http://www.makrobicz.com/server.html

Results: Why did I pick on Human Click? Because of all the available on site chat programs I have come across, HC is the only one I have not found to cause this fault themselves. I have had to adjust the page coding to force a secondary server downtime simulation. Something you should bear in mind if thinking of adding a visitor chat facility to your web pages. (Yes I do use HC for clients,  at least until something better and more reliable comes along). I do not have any financial affiliation with HumanClick whatsoever.

The obvious connotations of this problem is that your viewers will simply click away and waste the hard work in getting them to the site in the first place.

3) Unknown content. Another common pitfall with secondary server banners et cetera is the issue of unknown content. If your web page is pulling a file from another server, who is to say what the content of that file is. Imagine the Jelly bean website with a banner on  top of the page advertising "Dento the wonder toothpaste". There is a deeper rooted problem associated with this which is explained in the following unusual pitfalls section.

4) Download times. I have left it to last in this section because it seems so important that it doesn't matter where it goes. The single most detrimental aspect to a webpage is the download time. Your viewers (as a collective) will be ready to click away from your website if nothing happens after 3 seconds. Yes, just 3 seconds and the first wave of "leavers" are twitching to leave your site. Demographic models can show that these "3 seconders" are unlikely to buy from your web site on this visit anyhow, they are generally searching for information. Ergo splash page introductions are not a wise design concept.

Adding Banners to your page, will invariably increase your page download time, if it is from a secondary server, then your visitors need to connect to that server too, adding to the download time. Moreover, the banners you are pulling from the server may vary greatly in file size. If so, then you never know just how long your pages will take to download.

The major unusual pitfalls in running adverts on your website are:

1) Ad crunching software. Many viewers are now running software that will prevent your banner advert from showing and will prevent "pop-ups" activating. If these people choose not to view your ads, then what is the problem? the problems associated with this are two fold. One, the crunching software can ruin the overall layout design of your page by removing a carefully placed banner and two, as this software becomes more popular, you will get less hits to your banners. Of course, this is not to mention in the overall downward trend this will cause to the number of companies wishing to use the banner advertising model.

2) This is not particularly unusual, but it is regularly overlooked. From point 3 above, if you use an "advanced" banner feeder based on your viewers demographics, each viewer sees a banner the demographic software sees as the most relevant to your viewers. The problem with this is if your viewers are regularly viewing "Jelly bean" manufacturers websites and they come across your web site. They may well end up with your competitors banner at the top of the pages.

Before you decide to run these type of adverts on your website, it is always a good idea to take these points into consideration. There are alternative types of advertising available and some that the industry needs to wake up and utilise. For greater detail on the alternatives click here. 

If you are thinking about running an advertising campaign using banners and such like, please click "next" below to learn some of the associated pitfalls, then we will look into industry acceptable price models.      

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