Graphic Advertising FAQ

How does Graphic Advertising work?
Banner ads are displayed at the top of each page of UKClimbing.com and side-bar button ads are displayed at the side of each page. When a page is requested, the ad software chooses banners and buttons at random and sends these graphics with the page. This choice is weighted so that advertisers who pay for more impressions have their adverts shown more often.

What sizes of adverts do you offer?
We offer all the standard advert sizes - see below for more details.

Can I have banners and buttons at the same time?
At any time, you can run as many different banners and buttons as you wish and we recommend that you run them concurrently for maximum impact.

How many banners and buttons can I have?
You can have as many different banners and buttons as you wish, in fact we recommend that everyone uses a variety of graphics since this has proved to give a better click-through rate. We also recommend that you change your banners every few months to avoid them becoming "wall paper" to the regular site users.

How can I check my stats?
When you set up an account you are sent an email with an account name and password. Log into your account to check your stats. This will show you the number of times the banner has been displayed per month, the number of click-throughs and the conversion percentage. You can also upload and amend your banners on your account page.

What does 'page views' or 'click-through' mean?
Page views - also known as 'hits' or 'impressions', this is the total number of times all pages are seen by visitors. For example, if a single page is looked at 10 times, that is 10 page views. If 5 different pages are looked at 10 times each, then that is 50 page views.
Click-thru - this is when a user clicks on a advert to 'click-through' to visit your web site.

Can my advert appear on a more prominent page?
The way the graphic ads system works makes this a superfluous question since a graphic ad is never associated with a particular page. Just because you see the banner on a certain page once doesn't mean that others see the same banner on the same page, nor that you will see that banner next time you visit the particular page. You pay for a number of impressions not for a location, but each time your banner is served, there is someone looking at the page with your banner on. We do have several specific and very prominent static locations across the site. Contact us is you are interested in one of these.

Why can't I see my banner?
If you have purchased a small number of banners (less than 50,000) then you will not see your banner very often. The total traffic generated by UKC was 18,870,000 page views for last month, so a banner with 50,000 impressions will only appear once for every 370 pages loaded. However, this does not mean that you can't achieve a good click-through rate on a small number of banners.

What rate of 'click-through' can I expect on my banner?
This will depend on how well your banner is designed, and its relevance to our users. From your account page, you can view the click-through rate for any one banner or all the banners together. Anything less than 0.10% would be below average while anything more than 0.25% would be good. The Google average click-through-rate is between 0.25% and 0.30%. Of course any graphic advertising on a web site that doesn't get clicked on is still doing just as good a job as a print advert in a magazine.

Do you support Flash Banners?
Yes. Flash banners will click through to to external URLs, and our monitoring software will measure the click throughs, but we aren't able to support Flash banners with sound files and other functionality built in.

Advert Sizes

This is the information you need to produce your banners and buttons. If you have problems uploading your adverts, or have any other questions please contact us.

Static Banners and Buttons:

Format: JPEG of GIF (make sure your upload file has the suffix .jpg or .gif)
Maximum file size: 50Kb, hosted on our server (you can drop the quality of a jpeg to 50% without losing noticable quality for smaller images like banners)

Animated Banners and Buttons:

Format: GIF
Maximum file size: 150Kb, hosted on our server
Three loops of animation and five frames maximum.

Flash Banners and Buttons:

Format: Flash .swf file
Maximum file size: 150Kb
No ActionScript is required for the click-through URLs
No added funtionality of Flash is supported - eg. no sound files, or roll-over changes.

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