Planning a banner advertising campaign

If you do not have specific online banner advertising planning experience, I suggest using an internet advertising agency to plan, implement and optimise your campaign. However, if you are a small business owner or marketing manager with a shoe string budget, hopefully the below will help you get your name out there and in front of the right eyeballs.

Planning banner advertising campaigns can be very difficult but the Doubleclick Ad planner (owned by Google) tool can make it easier. All you have to do is choose your target demographics and pick a few sites that you feel may be relevant. The tool will then provide lots of useful demographic and traffic data about the site. This includes for example the reach, education level and gender split. You can also retrieve ad specs for your banner design and export your banner advertising plan into CSV format.

If you want to obtain even more reach then you could approach an ad network such as Drive PM or Advertising.com. They are huge networks that offer advertising across thousands of sites. They also provide good targeting options. One drawback is that there minimum spends are around £5,000. If your budget does not go that far you can also try Accelerator or ValueClick.

In order to maximise your budget you should use an internet advertising agency that has experience in banner advertising planning and buying. This is because they will be able to advise you on design and creation of your ads so you can maximise response rates. They should also be able to use their experience and knowledge to plan a campaign which matches your target cost per sale. It takes years of experience to be able to plan effectively if it is done incorrectly you could waste your whole budget.