A problem I find with new advertisers entering into online marketing is that they immediately choose PPC over any other competitor. Before you commit to any advertising programme, you really do need to know every competitor inside out to make sure you have chosen the right programme. This is why it is advisable that you look at PPC’s pros and cons too.

I have always thought that banner advertising has been the next best thing to pay per click advertising. The pros will explain why I think this while the cons will also make clear why it is also not as good as PPC.

Pros

Banner advertising, with the likes of BuySellAds, has had alot of innovation happen to it over the years which has given it some great unique selling points:

• You are in control – Unlike PPC, you have 100% control over what website you want to advertise on. Although this can be seen as a bad thing if you choose the wrong website to advertise on, it can be seen as a massive positive too.
• Easy to budget – Since banner advertising works around selling advertising units on a fixed 30 day period, you can budget much easily. As well as this, you can foreshadow your advertising campaign’s cash flow forecast making it easier to also budget into the future.
• Easy to use interface – One of BuySellAds’s major updates was the introduction of a new UI. The great thing about the new user interface is that it makes everything much clearer and easier to get too. For some advertisers, a good UI is a must.

Cons

This is the part of the article which sets apart banner advertising from PPC. Unfortunately, banner advertising does have some serious cons which could potentially affect how successful a banner advertising campaign turns out to be.

• No guaranteed results – The biggest problem with banner advertising, by far, is the fact that every advertising unit you purchase will come at a risk since clicks are not guaranteed. In banner advertising, it is impressions for the advert that are guaranteed. This means you could get much lower clicks than you thought you would resulting in an inefficient campaign.
• Irrelevant traffic – Since you have full control over what website you advertise on, you may find that the traffic that is directed to your landing page isn’t as related to what you want as you might have hoped. For example, you might be trying to sell a car and buy an advertising unit on a car website. However, a section of the website might be on how to rebuild cars which means the traffic won’t be interested in buying cars but restoring them. You need to very careful when it comes to choosing what website to advertise on.
• Higher CPC – I tend to find that my banner advertising campaigns adopt a much higher CPC than PPC due to the fact that the adverts under achieve and get not many clicks. What’s the reason for this? For choosing the wrong website to advertise on is usually the reason. This is why banner advertising can never guarantee an advertiser results.