Not so long ago, people declared banner advertising dead. Text ads took over giving higher CTR and ROI. Banners ruled the earlier days of web. Like everything that is overused or misused, banners began to annoy visitors. Banners are often intrusive and trying to catch attention. Soon they fell out of favor, giving way to text ads.
However, banners came back in a small way. Placing banner ads is still an effective way to market your business on the Internet, especially when you are on a Branding mission. Everyone knows that CTR for banner ads is quite low compared to text ads. However, each impression is a visual presentation of your product or service. If you target your banner ad campaigns well, you can even get a decent CTR from your banners.
Here are some tips for effective banner advertising:
- Placing your banner ad all over the Internet with very little consideration to whether or not it is exposed to your target audience is not a good idea. It can be a tremendous waste of money and other resources. Do some research to shortlist the websites where your target audience is likely to visit and place your banners there. Make sure that these websites are not competing with your business by selling similar products, but are informative or selling related products.
- Once you got a list of relevant websites to place your banner ads, get prominent ad spots to display your banners. Banners that are above fold get visitors’ attention and are likely to be clicked than those lying at the bottom somewhere. Though these spots are premium, it is worth investing into such ad spots. When advertising on high traffic sites, create banners that blend well with the publishing site’s design.
- If the publishing site is selling ad space to your competitors also, study competitor ads carefully before deciding upon your ad spots. There may be cases in which you may want to compete directly by placing your banner among competing offers if your offer is fairly better than what your competitors are offering. Or you may want to avoid comparison with competing products altogether and display your banners only if there are no competing banners. It entirely depends on the type of business you are in and your relative strength. However, it is very important to consider competing ads on the same page.
- Tweak and test. This is the strength of online advertising compared to print media. You can test your ads with different sizes and different graphics and different ad spots. You can do it for far lesser cost compared to print media. You need to find out what works for you and where. You need to find your best performing ad, best performing publisher and ad spot. Once you find them, you have to analyze why they are the best ones among all ad campaigns that you ran. A careful analysis backed by extensive analytics can help you in creating highly effective campaigns.
