In an environment where marketing spending is down, it’s more important than ever to ensure that your advertising efforts are as effective as possible. A simple place to begin is with banner ads. They’re simple to create and, placed in the correct locations, can generate a significant amount of exposure.

Mashable estimates that the average click rate of banner ads hovers around 1 in 1000, which means there is a lot of room for improvement.

Here are a few quick tips that will make your banner ads as clickable as possible:


Banner Ads Should be Interactive, Not Annoying





















While the goal of any banner ad is to encourage potential customers to click on it, an ad that jumps in front of viewers or annoys them will be counterproductive. The goal is to always entice without being too pushy. Ad Age shares, “Ashley Ringrose, co-founder of Soap Creative and curator of Bannerblog, has a few ideas [about banner ads]. Among them: A truly interactive ad must have an interactive idea. That, and it should be useful, not annoying, to consumers.”

For example, visitors to a technology website will either be interested in or amused by Apple’s Mac vs. PC campaign. While an image of a car opening across all of the content will annoy visitors, a relevant banner with a familiar and humorous campaign will most likely get the clicks Apple wants.


Create a Product Gallery




It may be hard to target one specific product for the sites where your banner ads appear. In that case, why not seek out a creative way to feature several products in order to create a unique browsing experience right in your banner ad.

The enormous size of the average IKEA store doesn’t stop its marketing team from integrating a product gallery with 2,800 items that you can easily scroll through right in the banner ad featured at Mashable. That is no small accomplishment. With IKEA’s intuitive product categories and a clean grid design, this banner ad manages to capitalize on every pixel by capturing the ethos of IKEA, space-saving furniture solutions, while providing potential customers everything they’re looking for.


Integrate Banner Ads with Wider Campaigns

Banner ads don’t exist in a vacuum all their own—or at least they shouldn’t. You need to think of all the ways your brand is integrating your traditional and online advertising campaigns together (television, print, social media, etc.). For example, Apple’s Mac vs. PC campaign mentioned above is both a TV and an internet campaign that builds awareness and attachment to the Apple brand. Some consumers may even seek out the ad online in order to share it with their friends after seeing it on television.

Todd Wasserman writes for Mashable, “The TV ad you see builds on the foundation laid by a banner ad plus a billboard and a mention on Facebook. It all works together, and if you’re not running banners online, your competition will. So, the next time you hear someone bashing banner ads, ask them what the click-through rate is for a TV commercial”


Reward Clicks on Your Banner Ads

Your goal with a banner ad is to convince customers to click them, and therefore it’s critical to provide rewards for clicking. Ads are generally seen as an annoyance, and therefore your goal is to make your banner ad a welcome addition to a website—this is no small feat.

It all comes down to the purpose of your ad. “Remember, when creating banner ads for whatever reason, keep your target audience and purpose of the ad in mind,” suggest the writers at Elegant Banners. How do you expect your ideal customers to react to your ads? What will intrigue them? What will they view as a reward?

A humorous banner ad may be its own reward. Some banner ads may promise basic promotions such as discounts or free shipping. Other ads can take customers to a landing page for a contest to win a prize. Keep in mind what motivates your customers to go online and then provide something that they’ll actually enjoy. Mashable reported on Cadbury Chocolates recent banner ad campaign that created a sculpture made of chocolate. The banner sent visitors to Facebook where each “like” on Cadbury’s Facebook page prompted an employee to add another piece to the sculpture.


Keep the File Small

What happens if you create the perfect banner ad but the file is too big? The banner might not even open before the customer begins scrolling down the page, entirely missing your advertisement. By the time the banner ad shows up, they’re clicking over to another page, and an opportunity is lost.

David Callan at Website 101 explains, “This is one of the most important things you have to get right when designing a banner: if the .gif or .jpg file is large it will take a few seconds to download and by then the visitor might have scrolled down the page, meaning he or she doesn't even get to see your banner…So make sure your file stays below 10K, 15K at the absolute most.”

Download speed is crucial to making sure your ad appears before the page content. Keep the file small, and for at least a fraction of a second you’ll be the only thing the reader sees.


A Call to Action

There is little point in designing a banner ad and then placing it on the web if the viewer of the ad doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do with it. This is why a simple call to action is so important.

The writers at DesignPax write, “Without a doubt the best banner ads always have a call to action and yours should too. No banner ad is complete or will experience success without a call to action. Make it clear and obvious. Say things like ‘Click Here’, or ‘Go’, or ‘Enter’.”

Always give the viewer an opportunity to take the next step, and help them identify that step easily and quickly.

Banner ads have always been a part of the internet, even if they haven’t always converted extremely well. This poor performance history doesn’t need to define the banner ads you create. By focusing on creating interactive ads that don’t annoy customers, you’ll build on overall brand awareness and increase customer engagement with your brand.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a psd to html conversion company, and who also consults for a company that specializes in a to do list app for businesses and individuals. 


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