Creating banner ads

Banner ads are probably quite familiar to you if you have been on the Internet for a while. At first, they might have been able to capture your attention with their blinking animations and bright colors. But as time has passed, you've grown to completely ignore them, giving new banner ads a quick glance at best. Only on rare occasions do you click on them, and the same holds true with those of your friends who use the Internet. Given these facts, it shouldn't surprise you that the average CTR (clickthrough ratio) for banner ads is nowadays around 0.2%, meaning that on average a banner has to be shown 500 times before it gets clicked even once.

Banner ads used to be a very popular form of advertising in the past. Four years ago, in 1997, the average CTR for banner ads was as high as 2%. With today's CTR being a tenth of that and continuing to drop, there are two questions in everyone's mind. Should I forget about banner ads completely and if not, how can I get a better clickthrough ratio than what the current industry average is?

Due to the current dismal state of banner advertising, I'd recommend that you examine using different sponsored search engine listings instead of banner ads. Overture (GoTo) and Google AdWords are among the best solutions and will probably give you more bang for your buck. However, if you can create significant profit from each visitor who arrives to your site, experimenting with banner ads can produce reasonable results, just as long as you remember to start out small. Test the effectiveness of your banners in small campaigns before you spend a great deal of money on banner advertising. That way you can determine with fair accuracy whether larger investments in banners will pay off or not without risking to lose a great deal of money.

Again, remember that banners are a promotion method suitable only for online stores and similar sites that have a high profit/visitor ratio. If your site earns its revenue from affiliate programs or by selling advertising space, I'd advice you to look into other things to drive traffic to your site instead of using banners.

If you believe that your site is of the type that can benefit from banner advertising and are willing to take a shot at it, don't just jump in head first. Before making any moves, read my little survival guide below in order to make your banner ads more effective.

Increasing the CTR of banner ads

Although there isn't anything you can do to turn back time and make your audience click like it is 1996 or 1997 all over again, by making sure that your banner ads obey some basic principles you can achieve a significantly higher clickthrough ratio than you normally would.

The first thing you should do is clear one misconception out of your head. Banner ads aren't about cool design or fancy graphics. When creating their banner ad, many people focus on how good they can make it look. And that's where they are dead wrong.

Your banner's purpose is not to look good. Its only purpose is to get people to click on it, arrive to your site and complete the action you want them to, for example purchase your product or browse through your content. It doesn't matter whether they arrived through an ugly banner or a pretty banner, just as long as they arrived. Don't hesitate to use a less sophisticated design in your banner ad if it results in a better clickthrough ratio.

While understanding the above is an essential part in creating a banner ad that performs well, it alone won't get you very far. Here are some other tips that will surely come in handy:

Include a "click here" note or two in your banner ads

If you have examined the banner ads on different sites, you have probably noticed that several of them include a button that says "Click here". Why? As always, the reason is fairly simple - banner ads that contain the words "click here" get on the average clicked more than those that don't.

At first I couldn't understand why this was happening, because I've always thought that if the viewer is interested in the product advertised in the banner, he will click on it. On the other hand, if he isn't interested, no amount of click here-signs is hardly going to make him do so. Still, the including those words does raise the CTR and there must be a reason for it.

This is one of those things I'd blame on the well-known scapegoat, the television. The advertisements that run on TV don't require you to do anything else except to stare at them, while the goal of banner ads is to get the user interact (click the banner). As people have been exposed to passive forms of advertising for decades, they assume that Internet advertising is similar in nature and doesn't require any action from their part. This is where the "click here" signs kick in by letting the users know that they can and should do something instead of just watching. The result is the increased CTR observed by many advertisers who incorporate these elements in their banner designs.

Whether my thoughts are on the mark or not, one thing remains proven: Including the words "click here" in your banner does result in it getting clicked more and you should use this fact to your advantage.

Animation is your friend

Have you ever tried to read something from a web page, only to be distracted and annoyed by a blinking banner at the top of your screen? Most of us have and nearly all of those who have had it happen to them wish that they'd never see another banner that blinks or moves. But like it or not, a banner ad with action in it catches the eye better than an ad that is completely static. In this case, it is worth it to be a little annoying to get some attention.

While animation can make banner ads perform better if used correctly, it can also cause a disaster if you don't know how to use it right. Over-use of animation will increase the file size of the banner, which results in it taking a longer time to load and increases the chance that the visitor has already scrolled past your banner ad before it even appears on the screen. This of course has a very undesirable effect on your clickthrough rate, so before including any animation, make sure that it doesn't make your banner too heavy and slow to load.

Use large text that clearly spells what you are about

Many people tend to clutter their banner with pictures or their company logo. While using them is not always a bad idea, you should make sure that there's enough room left for text. Use a large font size, even if it looks less attractive than a smaller one. You'll have to get noticed and small text just doesn't stand out the way bigger text does.

In your message, get right to the point and be brief. Don't try to explain in detail what your site is about and don't cram all of your offers into one banner ad. You'll have about a sentence or two of time to persuade the viewer to click to your site. If you can't do it in that time, you'll lose the visit.

Outline the benefits

To be clicked on, the ad has to be read. But getting the user's attention is only half of the task. To get the click, the user must also have a good reason to visit your site. This creates the need to use some traditional marketing tricks in your banner. Words such as "free" and "sweepstakes" for example are known to generate a healthy response from the average Internet user, so if you are running a sweepstakes on your site or offer a product for free, it can be well worth it to mention it in your banner. It is also a well established fact that sex sells. Banners that contain a picture of a beautiful lady and a hint of sex usually perform extremely well in terms of clickthroughs.

Unfortunately, there are drawbacks in using these "power words" to boost your clickthrough ratio. If your site sells pet food, using the power of sex to draw in visitors is hardly a good idea. You would get more clicks, but at the same time you'd end up targeting the wrong audience. People would come to your site, but they wouldn't buy anything.

The same problem is present in using the words "free" and "sweepstakes", as they will draw in people who are interested in entering the sweepstakes or receiving the free product, but they might not be interested in actually buying anything. So be careful with these tricks. While they are occasionally very useful, using them can cause problems as well.

Small is beautiful

The faster your banner loads, the more time it has to attract a response. If your banner is too heavy, people won't bother to wait for it to show up and will just scroll down to see the actual contents of the page. By the time the overweight creation finally appears on the screen, it is already too late.

To prevent this situation from ever happening to you, you should always remember to optimize your banners for size, if you can do so without losing too much in image quality. It is often a good idea to also remove excess graphics or give up at least a part of that cool but heavy animation. I usually attempt to keep my banners at 5000-5500 bytes if possible. Fortunately as broadband connections keep slowly spreading, ultimately this limitation in size will be lifted. Until that day comes, your banners have to load up snappy on a 56K modem, which places pretty strict limits on their size.

A banner ad? Me? You've got to be kidding!

See that banner on top of this page? It performs well, pulling quite a lot better than the previous banner I used. The biggest difference between them is that the new banner doesn't really look like your average banner ad. It resembles more the design elements used on many webpages and someone who hasn't seen similar banners before can easily think that it's a part of the navigation system of this site and click it. This type of banners are known as "trick banners" in the industry.

Trick banners are banners that fool the user to click on them by disguising themselves as an ordinary application window or a site navigation method. These banners can also include an animated cursor just to get the user to focus their attention on them, or they can fool the user into thinking that it is possible to use the banner without getting redirected anywhere else.

Generally, trick banner ads receive a very high clickthrough ratio when compared to normal banner ads, but their downside is that the traffic they bring can be of lower value. Let's say we have just created a banner that looks identical to a Windows application and someone clicks on the "X" at the right upper corner of the banner in order to close it. The user does not want to visit your site, he just wants to get rid of the banner, but he still gets taken to your pages. It is highly unlikely that this type of visitors who are tricked into coming to your site will stay there for a very long time.

Nevertheless, it is definitely worth it to at least experiment with using at least some trick elements in your banner ads. I wouldn't recommend trying to emulate Windows applications or placing a "Cancel" button in your banners, but using an animation of a cursor or emulating a site design element can result in a good clickthrough ratio without reducing the quality of the traffic too much.

Targeting pays off

To receive attention, your banners have to be seen by the right audience. Rather than having your banner run on random sites, try to find places that attract the type of people who might be interested about your site.

For example, a banner that advertises search engine optimization services would get a significantly higher CTR if it was placed on this site than it would if it was placed on a site that focuses on Wayne Gretzky's hockey career. Always make sure that the banner is in perfect harmony with the content of the site it is going to be displayed on, even if that means you'll have to pay slightly more for the campaign.

CTR is important, but it isn't everything

The above tips should help you to achieve a decent CTR for your banners, but as I've already mentioned, getting the visitors to come to your site isn't enough. It is fairly common to focus solely on the CTR without paying any attention to what happens after the click. That kind of thinking rarely produces results that you can brag about.

It is just as important to ensure that your visitors do what you want them to do after they've arrived than it is to make sure that they arrive in the first place. The process of converting visitors into sales is a topic that is far too broad to cover in this article, so I won't venture further into that territory. However, there is one tip I just have to give to you, because I've simply seen too many banners that go against this rule.

Direct the visitors straight to what you promised them

Have you ever seen a banner that advertises a specific product at a discount, become interested and clicked on it? Were you happy when instead of taking you straight to a page where you could find details about the product and purchase it, you were taken to the store's front page, where you could find no clues on how to order this specific product? Did you bother to search through the massive inventory just to find what you wanted, or did you just shrug your shoulders and leave?

I've had that happen to me and to tell you the truth, I'm too lazy to start searching for something I shouldn't need to search for. The store in question was having a sale handed to them on a silver platter, but they lost it just because they didn't bother to take me where they had promised to. The moral of the story is, if you promise something in your banner, deliver it to the user on the very first page he sees.

If I clicked on a banner that said "See the new McLaren Formula One racing car", I want to see that car right now! After I've seen it, I can take a look at the rest of your site, but if you don't give me what you said you would, I'll just get mad and disappear. The average Internet user has a very short attention span and is quite lazy, so do the work for him instead of forcing him to do it.

What about banner exchanges?

After reading the survival guide, perhaps you're starting to get interested in giving banner advertising a try. But it seems very expensive and you can't afford it or just plain don't like the idea of paying so much for an advertising campaign. You've hear about banner exchanges, programs where you display banner ads on your pages for free and in return, other members of the program show your banner ad on their sites. This sounds like a good idea, especially as it doesn't cost any..

Stop right there. Banner exchanges sound very useful, but they are more trouble than they are worth. For starters, several banner exchanges have a 2:1 ratio, meaning that for every 2 banner ads shown on your site, your banner gets shown once on other sites. There are programs with a 3:2 ratio out there, but if you think that makes it a good deal, read on.

The second major problem is that many exchange programs don't offer a very sophisticated targeting method. This results in your banner being displayed on sites that have very little in common with your site and leads to your banner receiving a low CTR.

But don't take my word for it, let's do a little calculating, shall we? If we assume that your site gets 10000 pageviews a day, each page shows one banner from the exchange program and the ratio is 2:1, you'll earn 5000 impressions a day. After creating a killer banner ad, you beat the industry average clickthrough rate of 0.2% and your banner receives a CTR of 1% (a very good achievement, might I add).

For displaying 10000 banner ads on your pages, you get a whopping 50 visitors to your site! If you count the amount of visitors that left your site via the banner and those who got tired of waiting for your page to load because the banner slowed down the process, you should be glad if your net result isn't negative. In the end, you displayed 10000 ads on your site and received nothing in return.

If you want to display a banner ad on your pages, get one that pays you for doing so and invest that money into various promotion methods. Forget about banner exchanges, they just aren't worth it.