My take on Web Banner Advertising

How does a content websites make its revenue? The answer is simple and it is the same concept that magazines, radio and newspapers have adopted which is by selling ads. By selling ads, I mean the source (publisher) website displays Banner Ads of other target websites/businesses (advertisers) on their website based on an Advertising deal which will be talked about in a bit. The Banner Ad will be a kind of campaign which the advertiser would run on its end which can either be landing users on the Homepage or in case of an Ecommerce website, landing visitors in the Shopping Cart. The advertiser will also measure the performance of Banners based on some 3rd Party Ad Serving Tool which in most cases the publisher would also be using to track progress at their end. The aim of the publishing website is to get as many users visiting the website so that the chance of it making money increases. The publisher will get paid based on namely 4 deals listed below:

1) PPC (Pay per Click): This deal specifies that if a visitor clicks on the banner and lands on the advertiser’s website, the publisher of that ad will get a specific price. More the visitors, more the clicks and eventually more revenue. It is measured as CPC (Cost per Click).
2) PPM (Pay per Thousand Impressions): This deal is primarily based on the volume of traffic landing on the website. The publisher will be paid X amount per 1000 Impressions (Page Views) on the page hosting the Web Banner. The deal can range from 50 cents CPM (Cost per Thousand) to $50 depending on the publishing website.
3) PPV (Pay per Visit):Through this model, the advertiser will pay the Publisher based on the number of times visitors have visited the page. (A Visit is a session on a Website which occurs within a time frame for the same Unique Visitor. The Universal Web Analytics time frame standard set for Visits is 30 minutes but it can be changed).
4) PPA (Pay per Action/Acquisition): This is my favorite. Based on this deal, the publisher will only be paid if a visitor from its website performed a predefined action like converted into a customer by buying from the advertiser. In this case, the publisher will be paid a portion (0-50%) of the cost of the product.
I can add one more to this list which is MGR (Monthly Gross Revenue): This is more applicable to online Poker business. According to this deal, the publisher will be paid a share of the monthly gross revenue generated by a Poker player.

These banners can be targeted based on Country (I.P.), search terms, source of traffic, Day Parting (Serving Ads during different time periods) etc which is made possible by tools like Zedo, Atlas etc and can be used by both publishers and advertisers to track banner performance at their end. These tools help both parties to track Banners and manage campaigns like advertising deals and landing traffic.
All in all Banners are the lifeline of today’s advertising business model and they are here to stay. I will be next writing about the different kinds of banners present in the industry today.