For all its other limitations, the Web is perfectly suited for display advertising. Banner ads have emerged as the gold vein to mine on the Web, and now it takes only seconds of surfing to bear witness to their popularity.

Pricing:
Average Web ad CPM: $40
The average Web rate card ad rate was $40 per thousand impressions in May, 1998, according to research from Focalink Communications, a provider of Web advertising tools. That amounted to a 2% increase over the previous month. Weather, site recommendation and classified ad sites increased in price as much as 10% to 12%. Focalink's research is based on its database of nearly 900 sites that participate in MarketMatch, a tool that helps agency media buyers with Web ad placement.

Auditing Traffic
The issue of monitoring traffic to an ad on a Website is importnt, and you can tally the data you need using one of three approaches:

• track usage with your own software,
• pay a third-party audit bureau to track it, or
• combine the two for the most extensive data.

Many webmasters start with an in-house auditing tool and then add a third-party company for unbiased accounting, which can then be shown to potential sponsors. You may want to continue to use internal software as both a way of auditing the audit bureau and getting additional information about your visitors and the way they move through your site-information that is generally not supplied by an audit bureau.

Several options for auditing Web traffic are:

• Audit bureau: I/Pro (Internet Profiles)
• In-house Web tracking software for Macintosh: Getstats
• In-house Web tracking software for Unix: NetCount Basic
• In-house Web tracking software for Windows NT: Interse's Market Focus.

Glossary of Banner Advertising Terms AUDITING: The process of verifying the number of visitors to a particular Website or specific Web page. Many systems also account for "hits" and "page requests."

BANNER: Also referred to as an "ad banner" or "in-line ad." A graphic image, generally 468 x 60 pixels, that is hotlinked to an advertiser's Website.

CLICK-THROUGHS: a.k.a. "ad clicks" or "requests." Occurs when a visitor clicks on a hotlinked ad banner and is transported to the site of the banner's advertiser.

CLICK RATE: Also referred to as an "ad click rate" or "click-through rate." The percentage of times an ad is clicked on based on the number of times it's viewed. If an ad is seen (via an impression) by 200 visitors to a site and 10 of them actually click on the ad, the banner has a click rate of 5 percent.

CPM: A term originating from the offline advertising world. Refers to the total cost of making an ad seen by 1,000 people. On the Web, it could be thought of as the cost for 1,000 impressions / adviews / exposures.

IMPRESSION: Also referred to as "adviews" or "exposures." Occurs when an ad banner is displayed to a visitor.

HITS: The number of machine requests required to construct a page. For example, a page with eight graphics and text is equivalent to nine hits, eight for graphics, one for text.

PAGE VIEWS: Also known as "page requests" or "page transfers." Occurs when a Web page is presented to a Website visitor. Home pages generally get many more page views than subpages.

An excellent resource for exploring all the sources of banners is Mark J Welch's "Web Site Banner Advertising: Banner Ad Networks and Brokers", at http://www.markwelch.com/bannerad.htm

Back to Editorial Section