How to design a banner for your online advertising campaign
A banner ad is a popular form used for online advertising since the early Internet era. As you have probably noticed while browsing different websites, there are different types of banner ads. Banner ads are usually an image file created in GIF or Adobe Flash format, embedded at the top or side of a web page. Its presence on the Internet and its importance to many online businesses is immense.
Banner ads appear on all kinds of websites and have different looks and themes, but they all share one basic function: attracting glances and clicks. Similar to a traditional ad you would see in a print publication such as a newspaper or magazine, a banner ad provides website visitors with information about the advertiser, with the added ability to take an interested customer directly to the advertiser’s website. advertiser.
Banner ads come in all different sizes, shapes, and file formats. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) specifies different banner sizes based on pixel dimensions. The IAB standard banner sizes are not the only banner ads used online, but they are a good representation of the range of common banner ads accepted by most websites. And the actual creativity of the banner ads varies considerably. The simplest online banner ad is a static GIF or JPEG image, with an HTML link to the advertiser’s home page.
Advertisers often measure the effectiveness of their banner ad performance based on click-through rate (CTR), which describes the ratio of page views to clicks. It is expressed as the percentage of all visitors to a particular web page that actually clicked on the banner ad after viewing it. The typical CTR for most banner ads is below 1 percent, and CTRs significantly higher than that are very rare.
The declining CTR of banner ads gave birth to a new crop of internet ads. To get more attention from visitors, many banner ads are now designed with flash to add multimedia elements such as animation, sound, video, games, and interactivity. These interactive banner ads often outperform their static counterparts by more than 200%.
Website visitors are more likely to notice flash banners that have moving images or are fun and playable. Example: If you have a small flash game embedded within a flash banner, many visitors will play that game and be redirected to your website after having ‘won’ or ‘lost’ the game. Although interactive banners are usually larger in terms of file size, the popularity of broadband internet connection has increased their popularity as most of the internet users can now view these ads much faster than in the age of telephone access.
With so many banner ads on different websites competing for the viewer’s attention, it’s important to carefully plan your online banner ad campaign and only place banners on related websites to attract the right target audience. You may consider outsourcing your banner design to professional banner designers, because a professionally designed interactive banner can perform significantly better than a static Gif banner, in increasing the return on your online advertising campaign.
Before contacting a banner designer, make sure you have your banner banner requirements clearly listed first, including line of text, images, preferred color theme, and home page to link to the banner. .
There are many professional advertising agencies and designers that you can contact online to create professional looking banners, give you access to their design and programming skills, banner templates and also their creativity and extensive experience.