Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

The goal for any business in advertising is to either win new customers or to remind familiar customers that the store is a good place to shop or the restaurant is a fine place to eat.

For advertising to work, the ad must be seen by many people multiple times.  Marketers call this effect "reach and frequency."

As a business owner, one of the first goals of your ad spending budget needs to be, then, "Can the Web site I'm thinking about buying an ad on help me reach many people multiple times?"

In helping to answer that question, there are two basic questions: 

• Will my ad appear every time a person visits the site?
• Is the ad placed adjacent, or close to the news stories people are actually reading?

The first question goes directly to reach and frequency.  It's common on many media Web sites, particular those run by newspaper publishers, to put ads in rotation with other businesses.  What this means is if you're Acme Hardware, up to three -- and maybe eight -- other businesses are sharing the same ad space -- maybe at the top of the page.  These ads are served randomly, but at best, if you're the owner of Acme Hardware, your ad is going to be seen by only  one-in-eight or, if fewer ads are sold, one-in-four, visitors to the site will see your ad.

If your ad on the site had "reach," every visitor to the site would see your ad, and many people who see your ad once won't ever see it again, meaning that you've also lost valuable "frequency."

In other words, no matter what price you're paying for your rotation-based ad, you're wasting dollars because you're getting neither reach nor frequency.

Worse, sites that use rotation ads often try to compensate for their lack of reach and frequency by overselling the value of bigger ads at the top of the page, or completely misrepresent the value of ads that are not adjacent to the stories people are actually reading.

Big ads at the top of web pages, well separated from the information people are seeking when they visit a news Web site in the first place, are easy to ignore.  And ads that appear only on pages containing headlines, typical of many news Web sites, are often missed by readers because such a navigation set up forces users to concentrate heavily on find a story worth reading.

The best online advertising sites give businesses the opportunity to have their ads seen, potentially, by every site visitor, and display content in such a way that ads are always adjacent to stories that readers can find easily.

We recommend to business owners that they insist on banner ads in non-shared spaces that is adjacent to stories that are easily accessible to the audience the advertiser intends to attract.