Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising Vs Banner Advertising

When you are deciding how to spend your online advertising budget, one of the most important questions you need to consider is what type of online advertising you want to buy. Traditional banner advertising was arguably the first form of online advertising to become popular on the internet. It was the most popular way for websites to advertise for many years. This was, ofcoarse, until the introduction of pay per click search engines.

The problem with traditonal banner advertising is that the average internet user (the people you want to advertise your website to) have "tuned out" from noticing banner advertising on websites, and have learned to ignore them. Banner click-through rates dropped and advertisers weren't seeing the success they once did. This has resulted in banner advertisers resorting to desperate measures to get the internet user's attention such as those flashing "You've Won!" banners. All of this has led to a major deteriation in the results (ROI) that banner advertisers have experienced and therefore there has been a big downturn in the popularity of banner advertising.

On the other hand, pay per click advertising has never been more popular and effective. Pay per click search engines have grown in popularity over the past few years and they will only continue to grow for one simple reason... results!

Here are some simple reasons why pay per click search engine advertising is better than banner advertising:

  • It's More Effective - Quite simply, those who use pay per click advertising on search engines experience better returns (a better Return On Investment) than those who advertise using banner advertising.

  • Easier To Target Your Demographic - With banner advertising your banner ad is shown to anyone who views the particular website that your banner appears on (which could be almost any site if you advertise through a banner advertising network such as FastClick). Pay per click search engine advertising, on the other hand, allows you to easily choose who sees your pay per click ad. This is because you choose which keywords you want you pay per click text ad shown for and therefore your PPC ad is only shown to those people who are actively searching for your product/service/information. This is the reason why pay per click advertising returns are far better than banner advertising - the internet user is looking for you!

  • You Only Pay For What You Get - When it comes to banner advertising, you pay an agreed amount per one thousand views of your banner. This is known as CPM advertising (stands for Cost Per Thousand - M is roman numeral for thousand). Therefore you may pay for you banner to be shown one thousand times, but there is no gaurantee that you will actually get any clicks from your banner to your website. Whereas, with pay per click advertising you only pay for the visitors you receive to your website. This seems alot smarter doesn't it?

  • Banner Advertising Is Dying - As mentioned earlier in this article, banner advertising is fast losing it's appeal with online advertisers because it simple doesn't work. The CPM rates, that website publishers try to demand for displaying banner advertisements of their websites, have fallen sharply over the past few years. This is due to the fact that banner advertisers simply do not want to pay very much for banner advertising as they don't see the same results as other forms of online advertising, particularly pay per click search engine advertising.