8 Useful Tips to Increase Online Banner Ad Effectiveness
September 11th, 2009 | Tutorials | Comments
Banner Ads are still the best way to communicate and provide the good message directly to your customers. The Flash technology has open a complete new area in web banner ad design.
In the past few years online Banner Advertising was reserved to big companies, web agency or Flash designer. Today this technology is accessible to everyone thanks to several online tools. Because of (or thanks to) this fact, we can see a lot of bad annoying and pushy Ads displayed everywhere. Obviously we all want to attract visitors to our website, sell products or anything else but you need to keep several things in mind…
1. Give the good link to the good Ad
The page that the banner Ad links to has to be where it says that is going to go. If you redirect them to another unrelated page, you will lose them and they won’t probably come back on your site. Moreover your brand will be associated to a bad experience and I don’t need to tell you this is not good for you.
2. Try to find a good eye-catching punch line
The only thing that will entice the viewers to click on the banner is the catchy phrase you’ll find to sum up what you offer. An attractive headline gets results. You have to select few words only for each phrase, keep it simple and have a clear offer.
3. Be relevant with content in banner
The most important thing is to be sure that the content displayed in the banner, such as pictures, is relevant to your products/services you are offering on your site. Obviously a naked woman would attract a lot of guys in « lack of love » directly to your website but if you sell something different like TV/Hifi products, these kind of visitors will surely leave your site after few seconds only.
4. Include logo in banners
In order to promote your brand name, you can include your logo on your banners. However make sure your logo don’t spoil your headline ! It’s better to make two differents banners, the first one in order to promote your brand and the other one to promote your products/services.
5. Add “Click here” text
According to statistics, you can expect a significant increase in your Click Through Ratio (CTR) by simply adding « Click here » or « free » phrase in the last frame.
6. Blue instead of Red
Again according to statisitics, it would seem that blue color is more clicked than red color. It doesn’t mean that you have to use blue color each time and anyhow. It should be used with parsimony and in complementarity of your headline.
7. Create several banners for a single ad campaign
You have to be aware that a single banner won’t be sufficient for your ad campaigns. You should have at the very least 6 banners in differents sizes (125×125, 300×250, 468×60, 728×90, 120×600 and 160×600). Why? Because you have to check their performances and know which banners are generating higher CTR. Then you will be able to change texts, colors, or anything else to optimize the banner and make the CTR higher. Also each time you will launch a new campaign you should create new banners. Indeed when a banner is too seen, it’s less clicked.
8. Make it quick!
Your message has to be displayed and understood within 10 seconds, after this time, you will lose users.
Tags: banner usability, create ad, create banner