CREATING A GREAT BANNER AD We ve put together a guide on banner creation and optimization. This guide will cover how to create a great banner ad for your media buying campaigns. By doing this you can create campaigns that have a higher ROI and perform better off the bat. A big thank you to Knowledge.ly and CannedBanners.com for their input. Let s begin.
BANNER BASICS There are four main elements of a banner ad. These are the headline, sub headline, image and call to action. The headline is the title of the ad, it is the piece of the ad that grabs attention or quickly explains what your ad is about. The sub headline is additional information that is maybe not as important or eye catching (the meat and potatoes of your ad if you will). The image is the image used in your ad unit and the call to action (CTA) is what actually drives the visitor to click your ad and go somewhere (for example, click here or sign up now). There are also three main types of banner ads. Static banners which are static images that usually loads quickly. Animated banners are usually.gif banners and include some kind of moving element or animation in the banner. Rich media is the final type and encompasses flash ads, video ads and interactive ads. These are any type of ad unit that allows the user to interact within the ad unit without leaving the page they re on, plays a video or provides any other type of complex experience within the ad itself. PRINCIPLES FOR SUCCESSFUL BANNER DESIGN There are many elements that make a successful banner, but we ve identified five in particular we want to dive into that will help you create a great banner. These are research competitors, keep it simple, call to action, publisher appearance, size and images. Research Competitors Researching competitors is a huge overlooked factor in banner creation that can be the most important thing you do prior to creating your banner. WhatRunsWhere.com is the must have tool for this. You can quickly look up competitors and see every banner they ve ever used as well as their recent banners and test variations. By looking at various competitors and what banners they re using you can see common elements in their banners. If you see all their banners using one certain image or phrase, there s a reason, it s probably working (and definitely worth testing out in your own banners). By incorporating these elements into your banners, you re reducing your risk by taking valuable information that others have spent a lot of money testing and using within your own banner creative. While you re doing this, make a list of what you like and what you don t (what elements are important?). You can then refer back to this while you re creating your banners to come up with a begging banner set to test that will blow your competition away!
Now you know how to find demographics, who should you be targeting? You can use your own website to see demographics if you have analytic software installed, or you can base it off your competitor s website demographics. The other way to do demographic analysis is by evaluating competitor s campaigns, not their site. Who are they specifically targeting? By doing this research you ll be able to find websites who has an audience that matches your demographic needs to buy media from, or present these metrics to ad networks to better target your media buy. Keep It Simple Instant clarity of what your ad is saying is very important. If your ad is easy to understand, short and to the point, it will probably be better received than a wall of text that people just skip over (don t just create a huge block of text). You can achieve this by using a strong and large font and using less work. If you stick with a simple font that is easy to read, people can quickly see what your ad says and actually understand its content. At the same time, sometimes it s worth testing more amateurish and gimmicky fonts as they may stick out more (we ll talk about testing EVERYTHING in a little bit, hang tight!). You should also keep your ad content relevant to what you re actually promoting. By keeping your audience (who you re actually going after) in mind while you re creating your ads you can create something that is on topic that engages the visitor. Words that encourage people to interact with the ad are a great way to get attention as long as it is on topic (For example, Did You Know.). An important factor to remember is you don t need to tell your whole story with your ad. You just need to say enough to get someone interested enough to click on your ad; your website should do the rest. Call to Action (CTA) This is a huge part of your ad. Calls to action like Click Here, Sign Up Now and Learn More promote a visitor to interact with your ad. By asking someone to interact with your ad they re much more likely to do so. If you don t have a CTA button in your ad, adding one will instantly boost your click through rate (CTR). CTA phrases that include incentives work very well and are worth testing (For example, Try It Free). If you re animating your banner, or it is rich media, make sure the end of the animation has your call to action on it. Once the visitor is done watching the ad, the call to action will prompt them to actually follow through with what they actually watched.
Publisher Experience When you re creating your ads, keep the website(s) you re advertising on or planning to advertise on in mind. Ads that look like an element of the website or blend in with the website tend to have a better response rate from visitors. You can choose colors in context to your website placement. If you run the same ad across every website, it may do well, but running customized ads for your larger specific sites will boost your ad performance. You can try to match your ads color scheme, border or just background to the site content to achieve this. A great free tool for color schemes is Adobe Kuler, found at http://kuler.adobe.com. Size and Images There are many different banner ad sizes. A full list can be found at the IAB website (http://www.iab.net/guidelines/508676/508767/displayguidelines). The most popular sizes are 728x90, 160x600 and 300x250 (these are pixel dimensions). When you create ads, if you create them with these three sizes in mind it can help you better plan the content of your ad and how it needs to appear within the ad. Images in your ad can be a make or break factor of your ad. Testing multiple images is very important. You can get images from many places across the web. For example, free stock photo websites like Istockphoto.com and shutterstock.com are great places to look (there are also free stock photo websites like sxc.hu and morguefile.com if you re on a budget). You want an image that draws a viewer s eye to your ad. It can be shocking, attractive, cute or any other type of engaging image. The only way to know what image type is perfect for your ad to be the best it can is to test multiple variations out. Other important factors to consider include the spacing and look of your actual ad. You don t want the ad to be too cluttered and hard to read. The color scheme is also very important. Test multiple colors and find the one that correctly fits with the websites you re advertising on and the audiences you re targeting.
Tips Tips is our short section where we re going to throw out a few short tips and tricks that may not fit into the other sections. These are things you may want to test or keep in mind with your ads. Ugly Works: Ugly ads often work. Some of the best performing ads look like they were drawn by a child. Sometimes a change from the pretty banners people see every day is a great way to get them to notice your ad and engage with it Sometimes Less is More: Sometimes ads with almost no content on them but a simple element like the basic value proposition of the offering or some simple information do well. Leave a tantalizing hint and let the visitor follow through to your website for more information. Scroll bars, Play Buttons and Loading Screens. Oh My!: Incorporating elements into your ads like fake scroll bars, play buttons (as if clicking the ad would play a video) and loading screens are creative ways to make people take notice of your ad and click on it. The issue here is you have to play with a fine line between targeted visitors and curiosity clicks (people who just click on the ad to see what it is). Multi Ad Appearance: By making your ad seem like it is an ad unit with multiple ads in it, you can have multiple attempts at conveying your message to the user.
SOME EXAMPLES OF ADS THAT REFLECT WHAT WE VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT
TEST, TEST, AND TEST (TEST EVERYTHING) There is no such thing as the perfect banner ad. You can always improve your ads. The most important takeaway here is to never stop testing. You can test everything in your ad, from higher level elements such as the headline to the text to your call to action, to smaller details like call to action button color or shape, there s always something to test. By constantly testing new ads you can constantly improve your media buying campaign and boost your return on investment and satisfaction. If you are just starting a media buying campaign, we d suggest making a few radically different ads. Test these against each other to get a starting point of what is working and then start testing variations of the ad types that seem to show the most promise. WhatRunsWhere.com is crucial here as it can save you a lot of time and money testing ads by allowing you to see what is already doing well and apply that to your new campaigns. Get out there and start testing and creating new ads. Have fun! About WhatRunsWhere.com: WhatRunsWhere is a competitive intelligence service for online media buying. It allows you to look up what advertisers are doing online, where they are running ads, from who they are buying inventory, and what exact ads they are using. WhatRunsWhere allows you to see what is happening on any website: who is advertising there, who is selling the inventory for them, and what ads they are running. With data from multiple countries and actionable insights from the data, WhatRunsWhere quickly allows anyone to dissect advertising campaigns, resulting in reduced risk and a higher ROI for online advertising campaigns. Try it today for just $1 at www.whatrunswhere.com About Knowledge.ly: Knowledgely provides actionable digital courses and training for online entrepreneurs and businesses. By assembling established Tech-Founders to produce the training, the end product is a course that gives real insight to what actually works. Get started today with their course on media buying at www.knowledge.ly