Banner Advertising

There is a lot of "talk" about the effectiveness of Banner Advertising. As a Lotto owner you should not be worried about that. Why? Because you are in the unique position of either using banner impressions for yourself or selling these impressions to other people. Certainly you care about the success of your clients but THEY should certainly be aware of typical click-through rates expected. Again, YOUR job is to deliver what they want, not question WHY they want it or if it is the right thing to do. Certainly if a customer wishes to buy banner impressions I suggest that they should consider a bigger bang for the buck and purchase a sponsor position. How you handle that is up to you. So, what about banner impressions?

OK, lets do some quick math. If you have 500 players in a given week and you have 30 sponsor positions, then you have the potential of delivering 15,000 banner impressions in one week on the ticket pages alone. Keep in mind that the weekly sponsor matrix page will also get 30,000 impressions since that is the page that every ticket submit button takes you back to. So, for a modest number of players you can earn or sell 30,000 impressions in one week. Remember that the home page is the start off page each week, so actually then, you can add 500 or more impressions to that total. In fact the home page banner position is more valuable and sells at a higher rate per impression than the other pages.

See the pattern? By controlling a ton of people and where they go to play, you can generate TONS of banner impressions either for YOU or for your customers.

Of course, not all 500 players will play on every sponsor. So, let's cut it in half. Say that only 7,500 tickets are actually played by those 500 players on a given week. You can sell 7,500 banner impressions to a client. Or you can use them as incentives for purchasing a sponsor position (similar to what you did with classified ads).

I personally use them to earn impressions in a banner exchange program and then advertise my Lotto with the earned impressions. It is YOUR business decision. The neat thing about this of course is that you don't spend ANY extra money to earn these impressions so they are almost pure profit or pure free advertising. I have operated some lotteries that earned 100,000 impressions in a week and I know of one that sold impressions by the millions each month. There IS a market out there for this. But, I believe that when you are first starting out, using those impressions for a 1:1 banner exchange is the right way to go.