Effective Banner Advertsing Tips

Love them or hate them, banner advertising is here to stay on the web. While other forms of online marketing – such as SEO and SEM – are usually far more effective, there’s only so much search engine traffic to go around, and the majority of websites still utilize banner advertising as one of their key revenue generation methods.

Given the prominence of banners in online publishing, most end-users have learnt to sift them out, and have become “banner blind”. A good click through ratio these days is anything between 0.05% and 2%. That’s a ton of impressions and not so many clicks. And when you’re paying on a CPM basis that can start getting costly, quickly. God help you if you intend to do any sort of banner campaigns on a social networking site (MySpace, Friendster etc), because most visitors to those sites are so banner blind you’ll have a hard time getting *any* clicks.

If you want to maximise your banner campaigns’ return on investment, you need to ensure that your banner is designed to be as effective as possible. It doesn’t matter whether you’ll be utilising the banner in a CPM, PPC or affiliate method, what does matter is that your design is *good*.

Good banner design follows a few basic rules, and you’d be surprised how often these golden rules are ignored.

Keep It Clean, Professional and Strong:

Your banner may be your first introduction to a potential customer. Therefore your banner design should reflect your company’s brand, image and market message. No one likes to see crude flashing images which send users into an epileptic seizure. End users are also very over those trashy, gimmicky, marketing messages: “congratulations you’ve won, collect your prize now!” etc. Keep your visuals in line with your corporate identity, and make sure your marketing message is the key emphasis: remember getting the click is only the first step, it’s what happens later that will be key to the success of your campaign.

Keep It on Target, Relevant:

Not so much a design issue here, but a marketing one. Your banner should both match the publisher’s site in terms of demographics, and your banner should be tailored with a suitable landing page. Does your banner say “get a dog here”, and then click through to a page about cats? Well then you can expect a very high bounce rate. Make sure your message is an end-to-end process. The same goes for just what sites your banner appears on, but that is a whole art & science into itself.

Keep it Lean:

Most advertising networks these days have very specific size limits, and will reject your banner if it’s too large (in file size terms). It’s still best practice to keep your file size as small as possible, however. A banner ad that is small will load quicker, increasing your chance of a viewer seeing it. If you’re using Flash, be sure to make use of vector graphics, as opposed to bitmap ones. Banners done in Flash can be really compact if you make use of strong vector artwork.

Standard banner sizes: know them, design for them accordingly

Once again most advertising networks only allow for certain dimensions, such as Leader-board (720×90 pixels), Skyscraper (600×120, Wide Skyscraper (600×160) and large rectangle (300×250 pixels). You should know these dimensions by heart, and tailor your banners accordingly. Due to their differing dimensions, each format can display certain types of information better than others. Make sure your copy adapts to the format, and you recognise how people will read that copy when it’s constrained to those dimensions.

Trial and test: when to blend in, when to stand out:

Depending on what site your banners are going on, you should always try as many variations as possible. Sure that lime green design might look good on your computer, but how will it look on that other website your targeting? Sometimes it’s great for a banner to stand out on a website, sometimes you’ll get a better response if it is more visually subdued and in harmony with the publisher’s site. The only way to know is to trial variations and placements. The great thing about online advertising is that you can very accurately analyse your banner’s performance.

Just because you think banner design “X” is going to be great, doesn’t mean it will perform well with end-users. Always, always, trial and test, and use the data to refine your campaigns. Create a suite of variations, then poll the data you collect to refine your designs, press ahead with the winning elements and ditch the duds.

There’s so much thought that can go into a good banner design and even more into deploying the campaign(s) themselves. Hopefully these first few tips & recommendations will get you on your way, in the future I’ll go more in-depth into selecting networks, publisher web sites and banner placement to get the most bang for your buck.