1. Design Your Banner for Specific Sites.

Targeted marketing outperforms mass marketing 2 to 1. If you’re planning a specific banner advertising campaign, then chose a specific website where your prospects are visiting and design your banner for that website.

Banner ads that closely mirror the look and feel of the site upon which your ad is placed usually have the highest click-through rates. However, you may also try a design that is of stark contrast, to see if it produces greater results.

2. Animate Your Banner.

Research supports the fact that animated banners outperform static ones by a significant margin. This is because an animated banner is more likely to get noticed. There are various techniques you can employ such as blinking or movement when designing your banner. Try to stay away from static banners that only change when the page is reloaded.

3. Keep Copy Brief and Provocative.

Using words like “Free”, “Act Now”, “Click Here”, and so on are effective at getting a browser’s attention and encouraging them to click through to your offer. Try a number of different headlines or action verbs and see which results in the highest click-through rate.

4. Test Multiple Design Formats.

Create more than one version of your banner and numerous version types. The most complex banners (those which resemble Windows dialog boxes, scroll bars, submit buttons or blue-colored underlined hyperlinks) generally get the highest click-through rates. Some have even been known to receive more than 7%.

Test each banner for a period of 72 hours and see which has the greatest click through rate. Use this as your control and continue to experiment in an attempt to enhance your click-through rate by changing one element of the banner at a time. If you change multiple elements, and a change in click-through rate results, you won’t know which element had the most significant impact. This is why it is important to take a slow and deliberate approach to updating your banner ad.

5. Use a Professional Graphic Artist.

Creating a banner ad today is much more complex than 3 years ago. You really want to source the creation of banners to a professional graphic artist. You can also visit some helpful sites with searchable databases of Marketing Experts like MarketingScoop.com or Elance.com to find a designer who can design a banner in the size you need it. It should cost you no more than $100 per banner and the results will be worth it.

6. Reduce the Graphic Weight of Your Banner.

If your banner is too heavy, it can reduce the speed at which a webpage loads. As a result, you can lose potential browsers of your banner ad. Attempt to make your banner file size less than 15k. Although this weight is a bit unrealistic for rotating banners, it’s a good benchmark.

7. Evaluate Performance Daily

Review the stats of your banner on a daily basis. Most banners show an average click-through rate of about .5%. These days, a traditional click-through rate of 2.0% is good, but sometimes difficult to achieve. If after 3 days, your banner hasn’t produced an acceptable return rate, then switch it out with another version.

Continue to optimize your banner by changing only one element at a time as discussed above. Also, be sure to advertise on multiple sites to see which produce the highest click-through but also the highest ROI. Some sites generate a lot of clicks but no-one buys. Obviously you want to reallocate your spend to those that show the highest click-through rate AND conversion.

Summary

By leveraging these simple banner secrets, you can make your web banners really perform. Be sure to use these techniques for online advertising buys as well as affiliate advertising. Wherever your message is posted, get prospective customers to click-through and take action.

In addition to optimizing your banners, focus on optimizing your landing pages. Just as banners benefit from compelling copy and design, so do landing (offer) pages. As described above, begin by measuring your conversion rates and change your landing page elements one at a time to increase your overall conversion percentage.

Banner ads are largely anchoring or branding devices. Think of a jingle on a radio: when you hear the jingle, do you feel compelled to suddenly buy the product? Not really. You hear the jingle over and over, and eventually, develop AWARENESS of the company or its product.

In the same way, most banner ads are generally not designed to generate immediate click-throughs. They are designed to be an awareness and anchoring device, not an immediate lead generator. Nationally, banner ad click-through rates are less than 1% (and seem to be declining every day). Banner ads are generally sold in terms of impressions (how many times they will be VIEWED) instead of click-throughs (how many times they will be, well, clicked upon!)

Like ads on TV or radio, people can both love and hate the concept and execution of banner ads. People tend to say that they dislike blinking ads that distract them from the content of the page: however, the same people will click on these banner ads to go to the advertiser’s site! (Another off-line comparison: people also say they hate commercials because they interrupt the program — but they remember the commercials.)

Banner Ad Placement Concept #1: Paid Banner Ads and Psychographic Marketing

Instead of a traditional focus on the demographics (gender, age, income, etc.), banner ads let you narrow your target audience to people who have an acute intellectual interest in your product. You are using psychographic internet marketing savvy when you promote your website with a banner ad on a high-traffic website that has content related to whatever you sell.

For instance, if you sell car parts, you may want to run banner ads on high-traffic sites where people browse to learn about automobiles. People visiting these sites are likely to have an interest in your products, so they are also likely to have an interest in visiting your site.

Costs – A common banner ad package may consist of 100,000 impressions. CPM (cost per thousand) can be from $20 to $100 per thousand impressions, with $50 being about average (October, 2000).

Positioning – Ad placement significantly effects response rates. A home page may get the most traffic, but placing an ad deeper within the site may provide a more targeted audience. The IAB and CASIE have recognized these sizes as the most popular and most accepted on the Internet:

Banner Ad Placement Concept #2: “Free” Banner Ads and Banner Ad Placement

Weigh your non-money choices marketing choices carefully. Free stuff always has a price – always ask somebody who wants to give you something for free what they want in return, if not moola. In the case of banner ads, usually a “free” banner ad developer or placement service wants reciprocal links back to a site of their choosing.

Carefully weigh the value of what is described as “free.” What will a “free” link associate your business with, beyond mere cheap-skatism? You may be spreading your name and image on sites where browsers have no interest in your product whatsoever, and lose your psychographic edge. Worse, you may be associated with links to less-than-quality sights and suffer image degradation. “free” can have some very high costs that you need to consider carefully.

Execution Concept: Do-It-Yourself Banner Ad Design Tips

• Retail software stores offer inexpensive software packages dedicated solely to banner creation. You can also download banner ad design shareware from the internet.
• When designing banners, keep them between 5 and 20K. The faster your banner loads, the more likely it will be seen.
• Animated banners tend to be more effective than static banners at generating click-throughs.
• Use ALT attribute in the image tags of your banners. Many people surf with images turned off. The ALT attribute will describe the content of the banner and can bring people to your site, even if they can’t see the image!
• Balance between being too creative and not-creative-enough. Use short action phrases (like, “Click here!” or “Find out more!”) and eye-popping graphics.
• Use the standard sizes listed above, for ease of placement.
• Don’t forget to measure the success of your banner ad campaign! Check your log files for click through rates from your banner(s).
• Compare your banner performance against sales. Is there a direct correlation? Do sales increase as click-throughs increase?
• Adjust your campaign where necessary. Deploy only the top performing banners. Change placements that are not performing. Rework copies of banners that are performing well to include similar messages or images.

Bottom Line:

The overall effectiveness of banner advertising is dramatically decreasing due to clutter and saturation. A few years ago, they worked to a limited extent because they were relatively unique.

Now, with the advent of permission marketing, most intrusive-type advertising is becoming less and less effective.