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271Chapter 16: Tapping the Internet’s Marketing Power

Here are some factors that influence the effectiveness of a banner ad:

ߜ Creative design including questions that invite interaction, free offers,
and good use of colors.

ߜ Targeted placement on sites where prospects are likely to be visiting.
ߜ Frequency: Place a number of ads with similar messages. Try them out

and then quickly — within a day or two — watch click-throughs to see
what’s working and yank all but the top performers.

A distant cousin to the banner ad is the pop-up ad, which appears in your
browser window when you open some Web pages. Pop-ups (and pop-unders,
which hide beneath Web pages) represent a very minor percentage of online
advertising, largely due to the fact that consumers rank them among the least
popular of all advertising approaches. Pop-up blocking software is in wide
use and Google, for one, does not allow pop-up ads on its site.

AdWords advertising program

Each time Google displays results of a search, up to ten all-text ads focusing
on the same keywords as those requested in the search are displayed down
the right-hand side of the screen.

The ads are part of the AdWords advertising program. To participate, go to
http://adwords.google.com/select. Once there, do the following:

ߜ Choose the language for your ad and the countries, cities, or areas you
want to target.

ߜ Write a three-line ad, followed by the URL you want users to land on
after clicking on your ad.

ߜ Select the keywords that you want your ads matched to, choosing words
specific to your site or product.

ߜ Choose your preferred currency and the maximum cost per click (CPC)
you wish to pay. A traffic estimator will calculate how much your
requested program will cost per day. Based on this estimate, you can
specify your daily budget and enroll in the program. Google will time
your daily ad placements to spread exposures over the 24-hour period.

A companion program to the AdWords is the AdSense advertising program
(www.google.com/adsense), which allows information sites with reasonable
traffic to earn revenue by displaying AdWords ads on their Web pages.