Recent studies have shown that the banner advertising to generate traffic to your web site are not as effective as print advertising. The actual click-through rate (that is the number of times people actually use your banner to access your site) is around 1%. That means that for every 100 impressions (visitors to the page where your ad is located), one person will actually click on your banner. While only 12% of buying customers arrive at a vendor's site through web advertising, most of the other 88% of shoppers navigate to companies' websites via search engines and hypertext links. You can encourage such linking by including URLs in your press releases and advertisements.

Where web advertising does excel is in brand recognition. Recent studies show marked increases in brand awareness after just a single viewing. The problem here is that it is hard to quantify these results. If brand awareness is your goal, you should consider a banner add campaign.

Web-based classifieds are the perfect match for the web and are more effective here than in print.

It seems best for the time-being to focus web marketing efforts on creating an effective corporate web site  and creating as many links to it as possible. However, if you must advertise on the web, choose sites and specific pages with high numbers for visitor sessions, unique visitors and time spent per page. Banner or button ads are useful to the extent that they drive qualified users to corporate sites but be sure your site is effective before running the banner ads.