Advertisers, such as myself, are begging the question whether it is better to invest money into banner advertising than pay per click advertising. Each online advertising platform is very different with each having their pros and cons. Therefore, it makes sense to weigh these two heavy weight advertising networks up. In one corner is Google AdWords for PPC. In the other corner is potentially quite a lot of banner advertising networks. There is no clear cut winner for a banner advertising network to use.  One banner advertising network that has caught my eye is Ad Taily where you can buy banner advertising as a text or image advert without ever leaving the website. However, it is clear that is dominating the banner advertising market for the time being.

What Does PPC Have Over Banner?

This question has been asked by many curious advertisers. What unique selling point does pay per click advertising have over banner advertising?

• You can start and stop a campaign whenever you want.
• You pay per click, not pay per month or impressions. This means if you have more clicks on an advert in PPC, it will cost you more. The cost for a PPC campaign is variable whereas a banner advert is fixed. You are guaranteed results.
• Text adverts are the heart and soul to PPC whereas banner advertising works more around images of the typical 125×125 pixel size.
• PPC allows you to set your budget right down to the dollar. You are not in control of the the banner cost: the publisher is.
• PPC adverts are contextually based. This means your adverts are only shown on websites which are related to the keywords you input on AdWords. You don’t have this in banner advertising which forces you to find a suitable website to advertise on (manual contextual advertising)
• There is more analysis with PPC than banner advertising especially from the way Google Analytics can analyse your AdWords’s campaign traffic.

What Does Banner Have Over PPC?

Banner has been around for much longer than PPC because of it’s simplicity. You pay the advertiser and s/he let’s you have ad space. That’s it! Here are other reasons why banner advertising in some ways is better than PPC.

• One fixed price and one fixed price only. I find myself even if I have set a budget that I still go over the budget in PPC. With banner advertising, there’s a one off fee, that’s all.
• You are guaranteed that ad space for ‘x’ amount of time. From this, you can change your campaign to fit it on a time basis and not money.
• CPC may decrease. If get a lot of clicks from your advert, your CPC for each click will slowly decrease until a point it will be cheaper than if you used PPC. However, this may have the opposite effect in that you don’t get many clicks causing your CPC will increase.
• If you think banner advertising isn’t flexible, think again. As well as having the ability to let advertisers pay in one sum, banner advertising offers CPM (cost per milli or thousand) so you can control your campaign to more degree than before.

If you want to find more reasons why pay per click is still the preferable method of advertising, click here.