There are broadly speaking two basic types of advertisements

WHAT TYPES OF ADS CAN I PLACE?

There are broadly speaking two basic types of advertisements to choose from: image ads and text ads. Depending on the circumstance, either type of ad might sometimes meet your needs better than the other, but on average (and in most circumstances) I have found that text advertisements outperform image advertisements in terms of click-through rates, conversions, and overall return on investment (ROI).

I found this counter intuitive at first, and I struggled for a long time to make image ads perform for me the way text ads did, but I failed at every attempt. Of course, I have had little experience outside of search marketing, and some advertising mediums such as e-mail and pop-up or pop-under ads may not be analogous to my experience, so I encourage you to experiment with both.

Image Advertisements

Image advertisements are basically those ads that use images (as opposed to just text) to attract the viewer. I’ll define two basic types: The traditional banner advertisements we still see on Web pages and in pop-ups today are one type of image ad, and the newer, rich media advertisements powered by technologies like Shockwave are another type.

Banner Advertisements. Banner ads are the traditional rectangular image ads you still see all the time on the Internet, on Web pages, and in pop-ups. The classic banner measures 460 pixels wide by 60 pixels in height but they can come in all shapes and sizes.

Banner ads have been around since the beginning of the Internet, and you still see a lot of them. Banner ads are not as effective as text ads, in most cases, and many Webmasters believe that Web surfers simply ignore them, but the fact is that advertisers still see them as cost-effective alternatives to advertising in more expensive media such as radio and television. Well-placed and highly relevant image ads can sometimes perform very well, and oftentimes they may be more aesthetically pleasing than raw text. This may be a primary concern for some sites whose ads are a secondary revenue stream and whose professional appearance must be maintained.

Rich Media Ads. These are ads that use Shockwave or other animations to capture the viewer’s attention and encourage a click. Rich media ads are generally considered to be more effective than static ads. A recent article on the advertising site ClickZ titled “The Static Banner Ad: Online Media’s Little Black Dress” claimed that rich media ads have click-through rates six times as high as static ads. In the same article, the research firm Jupiter Research was quoted as saying that by 2009 all online display ads will be rich media ads. If you’re interested in publishing rich media ads yourself, check out the examples of video and other options at EyeWonder (eyewonder.com/flashAds/index.cfm).

Text Advertisements

Text advertisements are, just as the name suggests, advertisements consisting solely of text. These ads often perform very well, especially when a well-written ad is run on a page highly relevant to the ad’s own content as we have seen in ads dynamically matched to search results and content pages.

Text/Image Combinations

Combining both image and text advertisements can be an effective way to get the benefits of both mediums: the high performance of a well-written text ad and the aesthetic benefit of images. The site combines text and images to promote different colleges and universities. The primary vehicle for promoting these colleges is the text: names and descriptions of the colleges themselves. The links beneath these descriptions encourage the user to visit the site now. And the long list of otherwise dry-looking text ads is broken up by the inclusion of school logos, greatly enhancing the aesthetics of the site.