I have done many articles in the past about pay per click advertising versus banner advertising. Although in this articles I have highlighted the main pros and cons against each one, I have not ever really made a conclusion about PPC vs banner advertising. Which one is best in driving traffic to a website or landing page and to profit from? At the end of the day, the decision is yours. Putting this aside, here is my conclusion on PPC vs banner advertising and, as you can tell from the title of this article, I have opted to suggest that banner advertising will never be as good as PPC. Here are my reasons why.
 
 

It Is Always A Gamble

The thing about banner advertising is that, no matter how you look at it, it is always going to be a calculated gamble when you pay for an advertising unit. This is because you are paying for your advert to be displayed for a fixed time to an estimated amount of traffic. For this reason, you could pay for an advertising unit and potentially not get a single click onto your advert!
With PPC, there will never be such a risk because you pay per click. You only pay for results and not for time or estimated ad impressions.
 
 

Not As Highly Targeted

With PPC advertising, the way programs such as Google’s AdWords and Adsense calculate what adverts should display to what consumers is done using very complicated algorithms that make sure the adverts are as contextual to the consumer as possible…<– you don’t get this with banner advertising.
The problem with banner advertising is that, in order to make the traffic viewing and clicking onto your advert contextual, you have to target them yourself. This could be fine if you have a ‘good taste’ in where to buy advertising units. However, most people do not. As well as this, you cannot guarantee impression for impression that banner advertising could get anyway near as contextual ad impressions as PPC does.
 
 

Less Analytics

As well as the above points, I have found that the way in which an advertiser can analyse his or her’s campaign in pay per click advertising is in a different league entirely to the way an advertiser can analyse his banner advertising campaign’s performance. Programs such as AdWords make this possible. Whereas, the likes of BuySellAds only make it possible for advertisers to see impressions and CTR…For 2015, this is just not good enough.
 
Ultimately, it is going to be your decision which you choose. Although I made banner advertising sound bad, having no ‘pay per click’ structure could also mean that you could get more value for your advertising budget than PPC! It really does depend what you are trying to advertise and where. For the majority of people, PPC will be their best bet.