Companies advertise on a Website because the Website draws people that the company wants to reach with its message. This is a far higher and more active level of choice than people make by picking up a magazine. In fact, on the Web advertising can be keyed to specific content of specific locations or pages.
If you're going to measure online advertising effectively you have to do it based on behavior in some form. And that behavior needs to be based on the Web in its natural state. Here's what I mean.
People visit a Website for its content. They do so to answer a question or solve a problem for most business Websites. For some business to consumer sites they may be there for news or entertainment. Your ad, whatever it is, needs to fit into a format. It can be a banner, a button, a boxed message, or it can be a part of the Website itself.
The active device can be a banner to click on for more information, a link to follow for more information, a form to fill out , or even a banner taking you direct to purchase options or a shoping cart .
What about the placement of your advertisement? It seems that the best ads are likely to be those that are embedded in content. Thus, an ad for a Kraft product located on a food site and embedded in an article on using the product or the type of product in cooking would be a good candidate. This seems to be born out by some of the recent findings of Editor and Publisher's look at effective media commercial sites.
What about physical placement. One study last year indicated that banners work better at the bottom of a page of information than they do at the top. This makes perfect sense to us.
At the top of the page, your banner ad could be an intrusion on the reason for the visit. Instead of looking at the information on a page that you have chosen to visit.
Whether it's a banner, a button, or a link, make sure that it fits the look of the web page.