No doubt it can be considered that pay per click advertising is the most used form of advertising on the internet for many reasons. However, this doesn’t mean the other alternative forms of advertising are not good. In actual fact, some websites suit other forms of advertising better than PPC while others do not. I have always had a high opinion of PPC because of the simple reason that it makes my own website money (and more compared to other forms). What is my opinion of banner advertising, though? Here is what I think of banner advertising.
It is Automated
The great thing about banner advertising is that 99% of it is automated. All you have to do is install some code where you want the adverts to appear and let potential advertisers see the spots and purchase them. It takes minimal effort from the blogger to use banner advertising and implement it into their website.
The only problem with this is that PPC is even more simply when compared in this aspect. For banner advertising, the blogger will have the responsibility of advertising their website to advertisers. This involves many optimisation tips such as making the right size adverts for what advertisers want to advertise with, location, pricing and the description you choose to use. Compare that to PPC, where you don’t have to do any of that, well, I know which one I would rather use…
Useful Cash Flow Forecasts
The best thing, by far, with banner advertising is that it is easy for bloggers to forecast their future cash flow. This is because advertisers have to purchase advertising units on a time scale of usually 30 days. Once they have purchased that advertising unit, it is theirs for 30 days. This means you can, at least, predict the next 30 days of monetization for your website.
However, you can forecast your cash flow further. If you have advertisers in banner advertising that keep renewing their subscription to certain advertising units (because they are happy with the performance of the units they are purchasing), you can predict how many units you are going to sell for months to come. This is great since it enables bloggers to predict and estimate how much they are going to make from their website in months to come which will help them control the expenditure more accurately for their website (on things such as domain renewals, advertising, freelance writing and so on).
Ultimately, the above two points are both positives for banner advertising. The only problem is that they are overshadowed by the biggest fault in banner advertising that you cannot guarantee income. It is totally dependable if you sell your advertising units or not. Some months you may make tons of money and other months not a single dime. That is why many bloggers prefer PPC because at least the income is more consistent and will make you money as soon as the advert is on your website.