There's no disputing the fact that a well designed print ad will stand out in a publication just as a well designed banner ad will be noticed on a web site. And standing out in a crowd ensures that your brand is recognized and your message conveyed.

Assuming you have a quality creative with a strong message, the key measurements of the success of an advertising campaign will be how many people see your ad (audience), the characteristics of the people viewing your ad (demographic profile) and of course, how much it cost to reach this audience.

Both print and online media use similar demographic surveys to help you understand who their audience is, where these media differ is with respect to measurement of their audience and the rates charged.

MEASURING AUDIENCE

Print Ads: audience is measured by the average number of copies of a publication sold over a given period, or circulation.

Banner Ads: 'Hits' are a meaningless statistic – the key statistics with respect to measuring a web site's audience are unique visitors . Unique visitors is defined as the number of different individuals who visit a site within a specific time period. Web sites measure unique visitors using sophisticated software that identifies visitors by the specific IP addresses of their computers.

Problem: As you can see, print and online ads have effective methods to measure audience, and although knowing total audience is very useful, it still does not tell you how many people actually saw your ad.

    Print Ad: Let's say you have a quarter page ad on page 12 of ABC Magazine with a circulation of 50,000. How do you know how many of the audience of 50,000 actually made it to page 12? This is one of the weaknesses of print ads – there is no way of measuring how many people made it to page 12 so there is no way of knowing how many saw your ad.

    Banner Ad: Let's say you have a banner ad on an inner page of a web site that has 50,000 unique visitors/month. How do you know how many of the audience of 50,000 actually made it to the page where your ad is displayed?

    All reputable web sites will have software that measures the number of times a banner ad is downloaded and seen by visitors. So, at the end of each month, a report is generated that indicates exactly how many times an advertisement was viewed.

WHICH IS BETTER?

The short answer is that neither is medium is necessarily better - both can offer effective distribution for your brand and message. For instance, print advertising is a more portable advertising option (not too many take their computer to the toilet to read…) while banner advertising offers interactivity (you can't click a print ad…). Without question, an integrated print and banner campaign is more effective than focusing only on one or the other exclusively.

Ultimately, when allocating precious advertising budgets, it comes down to getting ‘the most bang for your buck'. And generally speaking, it will cost far less to reach the same amount of people using online advertising as compared to print primarily because the cost of running web-based media are a fraction of printing and distributing a magazine or newspaper.