Not unless you count the branding value very, very high they don't. That's my opinion and I'm mostly in the business of creating places to sell ads so I should have a rather positive view of it all. My experience has shown me that buying banner ads on other people's Web sites to build traffic to your site is rarely worth it.
Of course this depends a bit on the business model of your site - what are you selling on your site? Can you make more money if you can get more people to come to your site? How many visitors does it take to make a sale or earn how much in ad sales? If you buy banner ads, how much does it end up costing you for each visitor those expensive banners bring you? You do the math from here. And weep.
Think about it. We'll do the math for you since it seems that very few people have ever done it. If a banner ad cost you £10 per thousand and you get a 1% click-through, visits to your site from the banner ad cost you £1 each. Obviously if you are an ad supported site selling ads for anything less than £100 per thousand you are losing money on the deal. If you make your money from ecommerce you probably know what percentage of site visitors buy something. You know the average order amount. You can calculate what types of advertising pay off best.
I was in charge of a six-figure Web ad budget at one point in my career and quickly found that as far as cost per sale went, I was much better off to spend my ad budget buying print ads in Computer Shopper. I found, the cost per sale was better from carefully selected print than Web ads and it was easier to do since I already had relationships with the traditional advertising agencies.
Branding value is of course quite the current buzzword and rightfully so. Brand building is quite a legitimate reason to run ad campaigns but again, it might be a good idea to step back and decide what is the best way to do your branding. Just because you are and Internet company and maybe supported by Internet ads doesn't mean Internet advertising is the best or even a good way to build your brand. If you pick sites to advertise on very carefully using a bit of savvy you may be able to see distinct value from an Internet branding campaign.
Banner ads can be worth it for branding or for traffic building if you can take the time to carefully place your ads and constantly monitor how they are doing. Here's what you have to do to make it work:
Place your ads carefully on sites where your kinds of people hang out. Decide whether you are trying to get new users or convert old ones from a competitor's product and choose your sites accordingly. Make sure you are buying context and filter out users who are unlikely to be interested in your message. If your products are only available in the US then pay a bit more to filter out the international visitors who are unable to take advantage of your products anyway. Make sure you are only on a few, relevant pages of the sites you advertise on. If you pick small, niche sites they are likely to put your ads on "run of the site" which means they don't have enough traffic or advertisers to spread the ads out around the site. Visitors to small sites doing run of the site ads may see your ad over and over again on every page they look at. You're wasting money if you're going for a deal like this (and many do).
Build a landing site for the click through that makes sense. If you have something special you want to shout about in a banner ad campaign make sure the ad links back to a page that covers that issue and not just to your main home page.
Do the creative right. This means having more than just one or two banners. There's lots of ideas about what works in banners and what doesn't - that's a whole 'nother article. But what you need to do is be prepared to customise the banners a bit for each site they appear on. When they get stale they need to be refreshed quickly. If you watch your banner performance carefully you can figure out why one banner creative works better than another and fine tune under-performing banners or dream up new ones based on how the best ones are doing.
Monitor your campaign carefully. Obviously some sites are going to perform better than others do. Several things influence this. The demographics of the site visitors have a lot to do with it. If the sites you are advertising on have visitors who are predisposed to be interested in what you are advertising you'll probably get a better response. So pick sites with pre-filtered visitors. With a bit of work you can find niche sites for the same price or less than the big sites. Size of the site and size of your buy also influence click through. Small sites can't sell you as much inventory so you may end up buying run of the site. Your banners are on all the pages, all the time. Banner burnout will be much faster in this circumstance. Sites that have ad management software allowing targeting may perform better for you. If you are the Territorial Army you want to reach young males and some sites have ad management software that will let you filter out all others so you get the most bang for you advertising money.
Make sure you rotate your creative carefully. If you're monitoring the performance of your banners site by site, you'll know when you need to put new ones up and make adjustments to under-performing banners or discard them all together.
This is obviously going to be a lot of work and if you have a large budget to manage things can get cumbersome. Agencies may say they will do all this for you but they're really no different from anyone else and tend to place vast quantities of ads with the sites they know can deliver the huge quantities of banners. It's just easier.
Banner ads or something very like them are here to stay but don't buy them just because you think you should and everyone else is. A dollar spent on banner ads will almost certainly not equal a dollar in revenue or profit. Just because you are an Internet company does not mean you have to spend your marketing money on the net. Just like any business you should spend your marketing money carefully.
