A lot of people mistakenly believe banner advertising is not effective; the opposite is the truth – it is extremely effective when you do it properly. The amount of traffic you can generate using banners on targeted sites can be enormous. It’s quite common for people starting out to go through a period of mistakes. While we all prefer to avoid mistakes, they do happen; but with banner advertising your mistakes will also cause you to lose your ad investment, etc. Never be afraid to make mistakes because years from now you’ll still make one here and there. Perhaps the cornerstone of your success will be going solid research, and you’ll sidestep quite a few errors, too. We want to highlight three common mistakes often seen in banner advertising; as well as what you can do to avoid them. Regardless of whether you intend to target a specific niche market like online marketing consulting or virtually any other specialized niche, it’s crucial that you remember the following tips.

You want to be careful and avoid the false idea that it’s the graphic images and design that are most responsible for a click through. Well, it’s true that having a good banner will attract attention, but it’s also important to have a call to action on your banner so that people know what they should do next. Doesn’t have to be a lot, in fact they usually are not – “Click Here.” If this is something you have omitted in the past, then be sure to include it from here on out.

On the other hand, we do suggest that you avoid making your banners too ‘busy’ with too much in them. Your message needs to be very clear and easy to understand. If you’re branding your company, we recommend testing with and without your logo because people can see your logo on your site – but test.

You’ve seen banner ads, and there isn’t much room to work with. Make sure your message is clear and concise. If perhaps you want to target a niche like cost of banner ads or virtually any other niche, it’s critical that you remember the following tips.

If you have the option of running a smaller one week campaign, then by all means do that; you can always scale it up if it looks good. You can do the small test, and it all the numbers indicate a go, then you can scale it up and expand. Whether or not to proceed all depends on your accumulated data, and that is why it’s critical that you track.

In some ways banner advertising is a lot like other kinds because you have to test, track, analyze data and so on. There are other more popular advertising mediums that are actually a lot more risky than banner advertising. There’s much more to banner advertising then we just talked about, but this really is a good introduction.