Banners are the creative rectangular ads that are shown along the top, side, or bottom of different websites to drive online traffic to the advertiser’s proprietary site, or to simply drive brand awareness of the advertiser’s brand.
Banner ads can be either static (non animated images) or dynamic (animated and moving through a set of still images or video plays).
A banner ad campaign tends to be set up on a CPM basis, where the advertiser buys a number impressions on a Cost Per 1000 impression basis. Banner ad campaigns offer a low cost way to drive brand awareness as they tend to be far cheaper than the Cost Per Click Search campaign alternative. The downside is in the nature of the campaigns being prospective and not based on search behaviour. Despite certain levels of targeting possible (behavioural, demographic, age and location) banner ad campaigns tend to have a lower Click Through Rate than Search campaigns. That being said they offset this by a significantly lower CPM charge.
The IAB develops standard ad units/sizes in which all advertisers must follow.
For banner ad sizes, the ad specs depend on the banner shape, ranging from medium to large rectangle, small to medium square, half page, and more. The three standard ad formats are leaderboard (728 by 90px), medium rectangle (300 by 250px), and skyscraper (160 by 600px).
Leaderboard ads are among the most common and best performing banner ads, with high impact due to its top-of-the-page placement. They have high ad viewability but are often the most expensive. Skyscraper ads are tall and thin and run down the side of the page. MPUs are rectangle ads sit within the page area and tend to offer better value, being cheaper and promoting within the relevant content.
The Ad Network market place is made up of Advertisers on one side (Ad agencies and Demand Side Platforms (DSPs)) and Publishers on the other (Ad Exchanges, Networks, and Supply Side Platforms (SSPs)).
DSPs like MediaMath are experts in buying inventory from Publishers and optimising the targeting within the inventory to maximise the client’s performance.
There is quite a cross over of services in this industy; Google, for example, being both a DSP and an Ad Network on the Publisher side. Agencies and digital businesses will use the Google Ads platform for ad campaigns, and website owners as a publisher can give over page space for Google AdSense ads, the inventory to show client ads.