Banner ads

There's some bad news for e-commerce. Many Web sites have built business models that depend on people clicking on banner ads. But an Internet marketing group called FreeRide has found that only 1 percent of surfers click on these ads.

The news is a little better from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which commissioned MBinteractive to study the advertising impact of online communications. The study doubled that 1-percent figure, but insisted that "banner exposure itself was responsible for 96 percent of the brand enhancement, while a click-through only contributed 4 percent." In other words, seeing the ad is what counts, not getting to the Web site itself.

This is problematic, because e-commerce is based on selling from Web sites, and without click-throughs, there are no sales, either.

Worse still, savvy surfers already prevent their browsers from loading all those painfully slow images in the first place.

The IAB study is at < http://www.mbinteractive.com/site/iab/exec.html>.

An alternative to banner ads

Every week, we post a new trivia game on our Web site. We're part of a banner exchange program, but it has had no measurable impact on our traffic. Our real growth has come from crosslinks.

For example, we started referring our trivia players to a similar "useless facts" site, and the operator of that site referred his visitors to us. These weren't banner ads, but links that were intrinsic to the site itself. The results were dramatic. Within two weeks, traffic on our trivia site had doubled.

We now look for similar crosslinks with each week's game. For our recent Halloween game, for example, we got ourselves listed as a recommended site on one of the Web's biggest Halloween sites. Traffic nearly quadrupled that week.

This approach requires more work. But it pays off because it is targeted to key markets, as opposed to the scattershot impact of banner ads. Crosslinks also carry an implicit stamp of approval from the site operator, whom the visitor often already trusts.

Our trivia e-mail list reaches nearly 2000 people around the world every week, and it has grown substantially over the last few months.

Take a look at the trivia game . Feel free to enter the contest, too.

Cornerstone is a writing and editing firm that uses marketing and PR principles to create "words you can build your business on."

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