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Banner advertising are the small rectangular advertisements appear on all sorts of Web pages and vary considerably in appearance and subject matter, but they all share a basic function: “if you click on them, your Internet browser will take you to the advertiser’s Web site.”

A bit of HTML code instructs a Web server to bring up a particular Web page when a user clicks on a certain piece of text. Banner ads are essentially the same thing, except that instead of text, the link is displayed as a box containing graphics (usually with textual elements) and sometimes animation.

Because of its graphic element, a banner ad is somewhat similar to a traditional ad you would see in a printed publication such as a newspaper or magazine, but it has the added ability to bring a potential customer directly to the advertiser’s Web site. This is something like touching a printed ad and being immediately teleported to the advertiser’s store! A banner ad also differs from a print ad in its dynamic capability. It stays in one place on a page, like a magazine ad, but it can present multiple images, include animation and change appearance in a number of other ways.

Types of Banner Ads

Like print ads, banner ads come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) specifies eight different banner sizes, according to pixel dimensions. A pixel is the smallest unit of color used to make up images on a computer or television screen. The IAB’s standard banner sizes are:

1. 480 X 60 Pixels (Full Banner)

2. 392 X 72 Pixels (Full Banner with vertical navigation Bar)

3. 234 X 60 Pixels (Half Banner)

4. 120 X 240 Pixels (Vertical Banner)

5. 125 X 125 Pixels (Square button)

6. 125 X 90 Pixels (Button 1)

7. 125 X 60 Pixels (Button 2)

8. 88 X 31 Pixels (Micro Button)

The full banner (468 x 60) is by far the most popular, but you will see all these variations all over the Web. These are not the only banner ad shapes and sizes, either, but they are a good representation of the range of common banner ads. There is no universal file-size constraint for banner ads, but most Web sites impose their own limits on memory size, usually something like 12K to 16K. This is because banner ads add to the total file size of the page they appear on; therefore increasing the time it takes for a browser to load that page.

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