Many internet marketers struggle with banner design and banner advertising every day of their career. This is because many of them understand the effectiveness of banner advertising. However, before you start creating banner ads, you need to have a strategy. That will get you most value from your banner ads campaign, and one of the most important of that strategy is a banner design that plays a very significant role in effective banner advertising. In this article, we will work you through the process of creating an effective banner design and ultimately banner advertising that will benefit you the most. So let’s jump right in.
What are the benefits of banner advertising?
There no doubt that banner advertising is one of the most used forms of online adverting, in fact, almost all companies, big or small use banner advertising to get online visibility and attract the audience to their websites or landing pages. It is because well design banner campaign could massively increase the brand awareness, could be affordable, could be measurable and have potentials of increasing unique traffic that converts to sales and overall profitability of the company. Many companies use banner ads to re-target their audience even more effectively after tracking their behavior. These points are just a few benefits advertisers could get from banner advertising. Now let’s look at the tips for creating banners and placing banner Ads.
1. What are the most effective banner sizes
There are many banner sizes out there which you come across everyday while browsing the internet, however, there some banner sizes which are considered to be the most popular and the most effective for banner advertising. These banners most loved by both advertisers and publishers because of their nature, these simply the most available positions on websites and blogs which many marketers believe they are the most standard banner sizes. The table below shows the four most effective banner sizes and where to place them.
Just put your self in the position of the potential customer. OR someone you would want them to see your banner ads. Naturally, people are more concentrated on what is inside of the frames. It is the reason why you have to consider using frames where necessary especially on banners with a white background; you should consider adding one pixel of red, grey or yellow at the frames of the banner ad.
3. Make your Banner Ad Text readable
The text on your banners should be clear, and readable by your targets audience. The reason behind this is because your text carries the message to your potential customers. You should consider that as a communication strategy. Therefore, make sure the text on your banners is always simple, concise, and clear so anyone looking at your banners will be able to read and understand The message you are sending. Below are the examples of good and bad banner ad text
4. Try out animation Banner Ads
Recently, many advertisers have engaged in animation banner ad, and it will be saved to say, they have seen valuable results with their animation banner ad campaigns. Many believed animated banner ads perform far better than the traditional static banner ads because of their attractive nature. However, the best way to use them is to make sure they display not more than 15, seconds and their loop frequency is maximum three times and above all your animated banner has a call to action.
5. What is the right file format for banner Ads?
When creating banners, you need to understand the file format also matter, this is because the file format ensures your banners display correctly in the publisher’s websites or blogs and it suits the right positions as described. Most of the used file formats are JPG, GIF, PNG, and HTML5 depending on the software used in creating them. One thing you need to avoid is flash ads merely because they are out of date.
The psychology behind colors in advertising cannot be overemphasized. Colors are significantly important when it comes to advertising as they give a special and unique representation of the message carried by the banners. Color evokes emotions of your audience for the first time as soon as they set their eyes on the banner. Colors are also subjective and have different associations in different cultures. Taking a couple of minutes to research your audience when making color choices will be a good idea. The below image show what colors represent and how they can be used in online advertising.
7. Make your your call to action is clear
Your call the action should at least be bold and placed in the right place. This because, it is important to make sure your potential customer sees it and take the desired action. Having a clear and a bold call to action will help increase your click-through rate, and reduce friction for your potential customers.
8. What is the right banner design file size
Banner design needs to meet some requirements. These include the file size as specified by most advertising platforms such as Google Adwords, Adstargets Ad Network. The logic here is to make the banners load as fast as possible on the publisher’s web pages for people to see them as soon as they visit those web pages. So keeping your banner file size at 150Kb is highly recommended.
9. Consistency is with your landing page(s)
Banner Ads like any other ad type require some level of a constituency, consistency here means your banners ads should direct or send your traffic to the right page which contains all the information about your brand. Your landing pages play a crucial role in turning your visitors into customers. Your website or landing pages should be properly structures and descriptive so that your visitors won’t get confused or lost and then have to leave your website or landing page. It is essential to convert your visitors to customers especially the ones that come from your banner ads so you won’t waste much money on advertising so in general make sure your landing represent precisely what your banner ads are communicating.
Making those banners complicated to understand will impact negatively on your banner ads campaign. Visitors will probably scan through your Ads just for few seconds, and it’s your job to communicate your message to them in those few seconds which is why you have to keep your banner ads simple and easy to understand. You might decide to have an attractive graphic that sends a message rather than having a significant amount of text. The key here is to keep it simple and clean.
Conclusion
The above-listed tips are indeed not a complete list of tips for effective banner design and banner advertising. However, they are the most critical top ten tips you need for effective banner design, and banner advertising, with these tips, you are good to start banner ads that will profit your brand.
Let us know in the comment section your experience with banner design and banner ads.
Banner advertising is known to be one of the most popular forms of advertising online. it’s no news that most it is also the most effective way of adverting online among many other methods of advertising but how does it start and how can online advertisers and publishers benefit mostly from it?. In this article, we are going to explain what is is banner advertising, how it started and how effective is banner advertising.
Historically, the first banner ad was created on October 27 in 1994 on Wired Magazine (then it was called hotwired.com). the message on the simple but innovative banner ad states “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will”. the aim was to send traffic to the AT&T website. Now that you know how it all started, let’s jump into it.
1. What is Banner Advertising?
The primary aim of banner advertising which is also known as display advertising is to direct potential customers to a website or a specific landing page. Giving it visually and attractiveness, banner ads are usually used for promoting brands across different advertising platform by simply sending traffic from the host website to the advertiser’s websites or landing page. Today anyone can start a banner advertising campaign through Google Adwords or Ad networks also called display network.
2. what is Banner Ad?
Banner Ad is a web banner crafted by the advertiser and displayed on a website or a webpage which consists of an image (.jpg, .png, .gif) or of a multimedia object (usually created using Flash or HTML5).
Depending on the technology used in creating banner ads, it can be a static banner ad or animated banner ad.
The static banner ad can be a simple image or a visual that is acting just like an ad but technically it takes you to the advertiser’s website or landing page of the advertisement once you click on it.
One of the most asked questions about on banner ads is “What is an animated banner ad?” because of this, we decided to answer the question here as follows:
An animated banner ad (or web banner) is a type of digital advertising that is delivered by an ad server. The aim is primarily similar to static banner ad: to get noticed on the website and make the user click on it.
Also, you can call the animated ad a programmatically generated display or sequential visual that creates the illusion that the objects in the image are moving. To learn more about banner ads, watch the video below.
3. How does Banner Ads work?
The logic behind banner ads is simply to direct traffic to the advertiser’s webpage, website or landing page which result to more sales, brand awareness, conversions, lead generation etc. the most common function of banner ads is they must be clickable and send the visitor to the desired destination. This brings us to the next question about banner ads which “why should I use banner Advertising?” the following lines give a brief explanation of why you should use banner advertising.
1. Brand awareness – it helps to give your brand the online and off-line exposure that helps grow your brand awareness so people can easily recognize your products and service which lead to more sales and possibly more profit. Big brands such as Amazon, IBM, Apple, Target and Nike among so many others used banner ads to grow their business.
2. Lead generator – it gives you the opportunity to build your customer list. As a stater, a banner ad can help you to get more users to signup and try your products or services and at the same time maintain a massive list of emails you can reach anytime when you have new products or services listed on your website.
3. Retarget your audience – by using tracking tools, you will be able to re-target visitors who came to your website and did not signup but show some interest.
For more information on how banner ads works and the best way to use them, watch the video below
4. Is banner Advertising effective?
One great advantage of the online advertising generally over the traditional ones is that it is to measure its effectiveness in comparison to the money spent on it. Regarding banner ads, the main effectiveness indicator for measuring banner ads campaign is the click-through rate. The click-through rate (CTR) is calculated simply by dividing the total number of users who clicked on the banner by the number of times the ad was shown to them (impressions).
For example, a marketer can say a particular ad unit has a click-through rate of 4% or 5%. That means that out of 100 impressions delivered, the banner was clicked on four or five times respectively. Therefore, the higher the CTR is, the more effective we can say the advertisement is.
5. Standard banner sizes for advertising
I am sure you come across various kinds of banner sizes, which are designed to fit specific spaces on the publisher’s web pages. this helps reduces the amount of work advertisers face when creating a lot of banner ads.
When you browse across the Internet it’s likely for you to encounter all kinds of banners in all kinds of sizes. Lucky for us, there are some standards too. And their role is to reduce the amount of work for agencies when faced with the problem of creating many banners and similar sizes for different publishers. And here is where the IAB standards come into play. But we’ll talk more about ad standards in a future post.
Check the list below with the banner ad standard size:
Ad size
Name
Where it’s featured
Supply
300×250
Medium Rectangle
Embedded within or at the end of articles
Good inventory
336×280
Large Rectangle
Embedded within or at the end of articles
Good inventory
728×90
Leaderboard
Placed on top or in inserted in an article
Good inventory
300×600
Half Page
Featured in the right or left hand side
Growing inventory
468×60
Banner
Featured in small spaces inside or on the left in articles
Limited, declining inventory
234×60
Half Banner
Featured in small spaces inside or on the left in articles
Limited, declining inventory
120×600
Skyscraper
Featured in websites sidebars
Limited inventory
160×600
Wide Skyscraper
Featured in websites sidebars
Good inventory
970×90
Wide Skyscraper
Top of website pages
Limited inventory
200×200
Small Square
Usually featured in the right hand sidebar
Limited inventory
250×250
Square
Usually featured in the right hand sidebar
Limited inventory
6. How to create a banner for advertising
Creating banners is no magic and does not require special skills. However, you need a bit of fast learning ability to watch a couple of videos on YouTube and you are good to go. if you choose to use other automated resources online still fine, you will be able to use hundreds of free Canva banner templates Or still you can use the premium banner template on bannersnack.
The video below will teach you how to create banners using Photoshop
1. Who is your main target and what do you want from them? Before you design a banner ad you need to know who is your core audience and what you want from them. Maybe you want them to click on your website, or to buy your limited sale product or to try your service for free. Think about that!
2. What is your value proposition? This will help you write the text of your banner and also choose a good CTA button text.
3. Choose a Standard web banner ad size – Because the publishers are usually using the standard banner ad sizes on their websites. So, if you pick another size you limit the reach of your banner ad campaigns.
4. Use readable fonts – You want the user to understand what you want to offer and what he can get if he will click your banner ad.
5. Use high-quality photos – A very low-quality photos and images used in a banner ad can create mistrust between the brand and the user. 54% of users don’t click banner ads because they don’t trust them.
6. Use your brand colors – If you want to create professional banner ads and you want people to recognize your brand on the internet I recommend you to stay close to your brand color.
7. Don’t overcrowd your banner ad – The simpler the banner ad is the easier you can communicate the right message to your audience.
8. Don’t forget to use a branding element (logo, company name or website) – It doesn’t matter how big you are in your industry, you need to use one of your branding elements to show the user that your company is behind that banner ad.
7. How do I advertise my banner?
Advertising your created banners is not difficult at all, there are a lot of platforms how there including Blogs that are relevant to your niche and also have a fair amount of traffic. the most favorable banner advertising platform these days are Ad network such as AdsTargets, Google Adwords, Yahoo and Bing Ads, BuyAds among many others. You can even use the link below to start banner adverting for a very cheap rate.
advertising generally require some principles and knowledge for it to be effective advertising champagne, whether you are advertising using Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, AdsTargets, You need to have a strategy on what you want to achieve with your Ad campaign, the great thing about banner ad campaign is the visual presentation of banner ads as it has the ability to use images and videos and can also allow the use of buttons, animations, colours and many more depending on the used technology.
so what are the most important things you must know before starting banner Ads
1. What do you want to achieve from your campaign – think strategically about the product or service you are advertising and decide what you want your audience to know about it.hat’s the specific idea you can build your campaign on.
2. Determine your budget – Here you decide on how much you are willing to invest in your advertising campaign to get you the return on investment. You may decide to spend $100 a day or $1000 a month to reach your specific targets audience. since money is valuable, you need to scale your investment in advertising to get the best out of your campaigns.
3. Who is your audience – Understanding who your target audience is will help you create a better banner ad campaign? Knowing your target audience need will help you design banners that will communicate the message in the best possible way to attract them. you may decide to target your audience based on their location, age, gender and their interest depending on the products or services you are selling.
Conclusion
Banner adverting has earned created over the years for playing a strategic role in building most of the biggest brands we know today, for example, e-commerce giants like Amazon were one of the biggest spenders in the early days of Google advertising,Wall Mart, AirBnb, Time Magazine and many others are a living testimony on how effective banner Ads could be. Banner ads have proven to be one of the most effective forms of advertising since its invention. we hope you have learned a lot from this article.
Please let us know in the comment section what is your experience with banner advertising 🙂
