17 of the Internet s Best Banner Ads. Love em or Hate em They Do Work!

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1 Love em or Hate em They Do Work!

2 Banner Ads What are they? Ever since the Internet started to take off in the mid 90 s, banner ads have been an acceptable way of advertising on the Web. Banner ads come in different shapes and sizes but the most common is the traditional rectangle that appears at the top of a web page. Banners are usually animated GIF images or flash banners. Each banner ad contains one or more hyperlinks to the URL of the advertiser. Believe it or not, there are actually industry standards that suggest the appropriate size for a banner ad. The old standard adopted in x 60 pixels was replaced by a new set of standards in The new standards added seven new ad types or sizes for a total of eight recommended sizes and shapes to use for banner ads. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, the group that came up with the standards, the new standards are designed to help Internet advertisers make the Internet a more effective marketing medium by giving the industry greater flexibility and expanded capabilities and choice for the creative community. (Richy Glassberg, Vice Chairman, Internet Advertising Bureau). Do Banner Ads Really Work? Few would disagree that banner ads are no longer as popular as they once were. However, the general consensus seems to be yes, although their popularity and profitgenerating potential seem to have declined in recent years, banner ads still work. Average industry statistics show that banner ads generally achieve between a.39% and a.5% click through rate. That means that for every 1000 people that see the banner, between three and five of them actually click on the link and follow the banner back to the intended page. Is this a good number? And can you make it better? Generally speaking, you can buy 1,000 banner views (the number of times a banner appears on a page that is seen by someone) for around $10 - $30. Say you paid $10 for 1,000 banner views and got a.5% click through - 5 people clicked through to your site. It cost you $2.00 per click through not too bad, right? But more important than what it costs to drive a visitor to your site, is what it costs to actually get a person to BUY something from your site (or take the action you want them to take). So, once you know the cost of each visitor, you need to figure out the actual cost per sale. It s pretty simple you take the cost of each visitor and divide it by your conversion rate. A typical site with a well-written sales letter and a product people want may average a 2% conversion rate. This mean 2 out of 100 people who visit the site will actually buy the product. If it costs $2 to drive one person to your site and you will make a sale to 2

3 only 2 out of 100 of the visitors, than the actual cost of the sale is $2 per visitor x 100 visitors ($200) divided by two (because two people will buy the product). The actual cost to make a sale is $100. Quite a bit more than the $2 it took to get a visitor to your site. This is important information as you need it to make sure your cost of advertising does not exceed the revenue you generate from selling your product. Keep in mind - the more targeted the traffic to a specific site is, the more it costs to buy advertising on the site. Targeted traffic is traffic that comes to a site for a very specific reason. For example, visitors to the U.S. Women s Softball Association website come specifically to find out about women s softball, not because they want to know about sports in general. This would be a great site to advertise on if you are selling women s sliding pants but probably not generate many sales for you if your product is bicycles. For $10.00, you are buying traffic on a site with lots of general interest type traffic your leads may not be highly targeted to your product. Tips for Creating Good Banner Ads There are a number of things you can do to improve the effectiveness of your banner ads: Add animation. A small amount of animation that draws the reader s attention can greatly improve your click through rate. Don t over do it Use intriguing words. Words like Enter here or Get on the bandwagon can increase click through rates because people are curious about where they will go. This type of traffic is generally not targeted and may not result in many sales. Make your banner neat, uncluttered and easy-to-read. People don t spend long reading a banner ad so the message you re delivering should be clear and easy to see. Use graphics. Pictures help to get your message across. It is true a picture IS worth a thousand words. The words FREE and Click Here Now seem to improve click through rates. Use of color particularly blue, green and yellow can be very effective. Ask questions that compel a person to learn more about the topic at hand can increase click through rates. For example, Is someone using your computer to spy on you? may compel a person to click through to learn more about how a person could spy on them using their computer.. Some statistics say that as many as 50% of web browsers pay attention to banner ads. Your job, as the banner creator, is to make a banner that not only captures the reader s attention, but is so compelling the reader just has to click on the link to see what else is there. In his article, Ten Tips for Designing Killer Banner Ads, Terry Dean gives you detailed descriptions of what you can do to create a killer banner ad. 3

4 10 Tips For Designing Killer Banner Ads By Terry Dean People who constantly ask me how they can design their own effective banners. To help them out, I have found 3 free automatic Internet banner creation programs and have put together these 10 killer banner design techniques. If you want to take the easiest route to design a banner, you can use one of these three free sites: To design my own banners, I use Paint Shop Pro which has a free fully working demo available for download at It is probably the easiest to use graphics software available online today. It even comes with a full animation shop program that makes animating banners easy. Just having the right software doesn't mean that you will create a good banner though. To give you some ideas on your banner design, try putting these 10 banner design techniques to the test. 1. Use the words "Click Here" or "Enter" every time you design a banner. You may think that these two words are overused online, but tests have proven that these words are able to increase the effectiveness of a banner ad by 20-30% without changing anything else in the banner. They inspire the reader to click on the ad if the headline of the banner interests them. 2. Animate Your Banners. An animated banner will increase your banner ads effectiveness by 30-40%. The key in using animation in your banner is keeping 4

5 it small. The reason that you don t want big pictures or images that look like live video in your banners is the fact that the banner will load too slowly on people s pages. The visitors just won't see it. 3. Create quick loading banners. Keep most banners under KB. This will be very difficult to accomplish when you are using animation in your ads, but it needs to be done. Most animated banners are KB, but that is way too large to load quickly. Keep them small. As a matter of fact, try to keep your banner under 10 KB to have good results from a banner exchange. The way to do this when using animation it to keep it simple, maybe only one or two movements. Then, use Paint Shop Pro to decrease the number of colors. A banner that may have been 15 KB can often be decreased down to 3 or 4 KB when you decrease the colors to 16 or 256. You need a nicely designed banner that is high quality but loads quickly. 4. Use an awesome headline in your banner. Don t think that just having a good looking banner will make people click through. The key to effective banner advertising is having a good headline. A good technique to use is to keep the same headline on your banner ad that you have on your entry page. Then when they click through the banner, they will come to see the same headline that sparked an interest in them in the first place. 5. The best word to use in your banner headline is "FREE." This doesn t mean that you just need to put the word "FREE" on your banner without any other text. Tell them exactly what they will be getting for FREE. Using the word "FREE" in virtually any headline will make your response rate increase dramatically. 6. Blue underlined text will often increase your response rate. When Internet users see blue underlined text, they know they are links. By placing your headline in this type of format more people 5

6 will realize that it is a link to another site. It will achieve a higher click through ratio. 7. A blue border will give you a better response rate then any other color border for your banner. Use blue as the border color for your banner and it will influence more people to click onto the entire banner. These little things may not seem like much, but they can increase your response rates. 8. It is often a good idea to use your web site address or some type of company logo in the banner. Don't focus your banner on your logo or web site address, but do include it in many cases. Your main benefit headline should be the focus of your banner. Your use of a web address or company logo in a small section of the banner just helps to produce a branding effect on people s minds giving you a few extra hits. 9. Use trick banners. Make your banner look like something in windows that people can click on. For example, a lot of effective banners I ve seen use what looks like a windows slider. People create trick banners that look like sliders, buttons, checkboxes, and drop-down menus. These types of tricks will bring out the curiosity in people. They want to see more of the text and will click on the banner. 10. Change your banner ads frequently. Studies have proven that most banner ads start losing effectiveness after the third time a person has seen it. If they haven t clicked on it by then, they probably never will. If you are spending a lot of money on advertising and purchasing hundreds of thousands of banner impressions, you will need to come up with a lot of different banners. 6

7 Terry Dean, a 5 year veteran of Internet marketing, will Take You By The Hand and Show You Exact Results of All the Internet Marketing Techniques he tests and Uses Every Single Month" Click here to Find Out More: Copywriter extraordinaire Kevin Nunley gives some good tops about where to buy your banner ads and how to make them produce winning results. Get Great Buys On Banner Ads And Make Them Produce Results by Kevin Nunley Banner ads are down but not out. The billboard-like Internet ads that appear on web sites everywhere don't pull the response they once did. Yet, today's much lower ad prices are giving many businesses an affordable and effective way to spread the word online. Back in 1994 when the Web was new, as many as 40 percent of people who saw a banner ad clicked on it. As time passed and banners became commonplace, response rates dropped to 1 to 2 percent. Those figures are comparable to what other media-- radio, TV, newspapers, and direct mail--can deliver. Banner ad rates have dropped from $20 to reach 1,000 people a year ago to just five or six dollars today. Even though the trendy luster of the Web has passed, there are still millions of interested prospects to be found online. This could be the best time ever for small and medium-sized businesses to stock up on banner ads. The Internet ad industry isn't taking response rates lying down. Recently the Internet Advertising Bureau approved standards for 7

8 new, larger banners. The new "wide skyscraper" size has already appeared on top sites and is three times larger than what we are used to. Advertisers hope the larger size will get reader attention, converting more sales. Experts warn not to get caught up in the flash of new banner technology. The quality of your offer and the clarity of your message are still the main factors in getting results. Here are five ways to make sure you banner gets attention and pulls response: * Your banner should ask the reader to take action. Something as simple as putting "Click Now!" on your banner can increase response. * Use words that attract interest and create emotion. Free and Special Offer are favorites. I like to start each line with an action word. Buy, Save, Profit, and Rush work well. * Push the main benefit your product or service provides. Most advertisers forget this point and promote their product's features. Show readers how a feature leads to something that benefits their situation. The chrome fender on the Gizmo 2000 saves time and reduces costs. Animated banners pull better response than static ads. Sites and banner networks usually have guidelines that help keep your animated banners from becoming a turnoff. Keep your ad size under 12k. Anything larger takes forever to load for anyone using a slow dial-up line as almost 80 percent of North Americans do. If you use photos in your banner, keep them low resolution so they load quickly. In many cases you can reduce the standard 256 web-safe colors to just 16 for an even lighter" banner. Animated banners step readers through two or three successive panels. Put your most important message on the first panel so those with slow connections don't miss out if the second panel doesn't pop up before they click away. I like to put the main offer on the first panel with a few delicious details on the second. If your banner is light and loads fast, feel free to have the most important part of your message on the third panel. For example: (1) Tired? (2) Feel better fast (3) Get Energizomine...Click here! 8

9 Before you commit big money to your banner ad campaign, test your ad or ads with a 30-day trial run. Most banner networks provide reliable statistics on how many people have seen your ad (impressions) and how many clicked on it to go to your site (clickthroughs). You can also check the server logs your web host provides to see where hits are coming from. Pay close attention to the web page visitors are taken to after they click on your banner. One of the biggest complaints is users can't find information about the offer they saw on the banner. Tailor a special page to correspond with your banner. Make sure you give plenty of information, ways for prospects to contact you, how to buy, and what your product or service costs. Too many sites are leaving these points out of their sales page, making this one of the chief causes of lagging banner response. Banner ads are the Internet's main advertising vehicle. Over the next few years, as more and more people get fast broadband Internet connections, we will see "rich media" banners that look more like television. Low ad prices and less competition makes this a great time to promote your offer or name online. By following these simple tips you can make banners a reliable part of your marketing arsenal. Kevin Nunley provides marketing advice and copywriting. See his 10,000 marketing ideas and popular promotion packages at Reach Kevin at kevin@drnunley.com or

10 BONUS #8 Want to create your own banner ad for free? Click on the link below and you ll be guided through the steps to create your very own banner ad. It won t take you long to create it and post it to your site. 10