Personally, I have found AdWords to be by far the most effective method of advertising my hosting company, but am wondering if anyone has had positive experiences with CPM Banners. If so, who did you use, how much did it cost, and why was it better than AdWords?

That's definitely interesting to hear. Are you going for general hosting terms, or are you using less searched for but more targeted keyphrases? Are you using the content network or just place ads on Google's search engine results pages?

I don't run my hosting company any more, but when I did I used AdWords terms like Canadian Web Host, Canadian Web Hosting, and a few more detailed terms. I try to avoid overpriced, generic terms because I have not had as much success converting hits from that source. I have also found that web users tent to pay far more attention to banner ads than they do to text ads. Have you had an opposite experience, ldcdc?

In my opinion CPM Banners are good for corporates and established branded companies, however if you want to reach close to your niche with specific country/region adword geo-targeting may work well.

I've got some traffic via their content network for what I thought would be quite well targeted terms, as it turned out to be pretty cheap. Suffice it to say that I've seen none of the results I was after. I thought that the numbers would make up for the quality, but apparently, I was wrong.

I didn't experiment with banners (never liked them much), so I can't comment on that. Sorry.

Also targeting few local keyphrases and narrowly targeted keywords may work better.

What does CPM mean?

Cost per Impressions (a CPM rate equals 1000 banner impressions).