Affiliate products and advertising are a big deal online; most marketers have at least one affiliate product that they use to bolster their monthly pay check. Within this sphere, banner ads are some of the most powerful ways to promote a product or to help others promote a product, using your site as a spot to do it from and paying you for it. Whichever you decide to go for, banner advertising is going to be involved one way or another, simply because they are easy to make and easy to put up. But what’s not easy is to achieve high click through rates and high conversion rates through your banner ads. It’s all about the design of the banner and, this may strange, where it is on the website.
There are a few different factors involved in making a banner ad successful for its owner, and here they are.
Focused Banners
Banners which are focused not only on a single product or service but then take the potential customer directly to the page of your site with that product or service are far more likely to do well than banners that take people somewhere else. You can find many examples of such banners here on 1DayBanner. If you’ve gotten a person excited about what you’re offering just from your banner ad, you don’t want to deflate that enthusiasm by taking them somewhere else! This means that you may have to design several banner ads or have several and put them on rotation, but it’s worth it when you have a smooth follow through from notice to click to buy.
Animated Banners
Animated banners are far more eye catching than static ones; the movement alone catches human attention. It also makes people curious and wanting to learn more about what you are doing. On average, animation can kick response rates up by 25% which is fairly considerable considering the minimal effort that often goes into them. The main trick is to make sure that your animation doesn’t obscure text, isn’t too frantic so that people cannot keep up with it, won’t violate the viewer’s space, and to put them in the right place on the webpage. More and more animated flash banner ads are falling prey to the idea that they have to be as frenetic as possible and that actually drives more viewers away than puts them in. Make sure your animation is away from your text and is clear enough to be seen without being obnoxious.
What Does Your Banner Say?
Banners have to cram an idea or two into very short phrases and that means you have to carefully choose what you say. When in doubt, opt for a call to action phrase at the very least, such as ‘learn more’, ‘buy now’, ‘read about’ and ‘learn about’. Things that provoke a sense of urgency are good too because they get people into a knee-jerk reaction where they click on your banner ad without really thinking about it. The deadline may be falsified, but then people usually want things as soon as possible anyway, so why not trade on that urgency in your advertisements too?
Interaction is also good for banner ads. Phrases that ask questions of visitors, use flashing icons to click on and things like asking a question and then answering it but leaving room for more knowledge are all good ways to get people more interested in what you’re saying and more likely to click on your banner advertisement.
Banner Loading Time
It’s important to stick with banner advertisements which will load quickly and that means banners shouldn’t be more than between 10-12kb. Smaller sized banners are more likely to be clicked than larger ones. Why? Two reasons: If the banner ad is loading too slowly, the viewer will have moved past it before the ad finishes loading. Second, larger file sizes will slow down the loading of the website overall and that causes web pages to lose page ranks and make your ad less likely to be seen (and incidentally annoy the webpage owner).
Size Counts
Size really does matter when it comes to banner advertisements. The best size is the usual 468 x 60 standard size, but skyscrapers are also popular because they are easy to jigsaw into basic blog and informational sites. The size of your banner ads will also depend on your page design.
Where Your Banners Are on a Webpage
We often think that banner ads are best placed on the top of a webpage where they will be seen early. However, this does not take into account the fact that when someone lands on the site where your ad happens to be, they are going to go straight to the information they are looking for, not look at your ad. This means that the best place for your advertisement is actually at the bottom of the webpage where the viewer will finish doing his or her work and will be momentarily able to be distracted into doing something else-namely, click on your banner ad! This is why Google AdSense ads are usually at the bottom of the page and are related in someway to what the page was talking about: it takes advantage of the fact that there are still thoughts like ‘what now?’ about the content just read and the advertisement may provide an answer.
Change Up Your Banners
Any banner ads on your website should be changed up regularly because it’s too easy for banners to burn out and lose notice. The shelf life of the average banner ad is about two to three weeks, so be prepared for a lot of changes. If you can and it’s appropriate, you may also change up the design of your website too, particularly for a holiday or a new product.
There are some automatic banner rotation modules out there and they can be very useful to you, so long as you have enough banners and themes to use these tools properly. If you don’t, you will easily end up with banners that have nothing to do with your product or your pages.
Most of all though, it’s important to be willing to experiment and change things up as necessary. Experimenting on banner ads is the best way to see which ones are working best for you and which ones aren’t so you can put together a great combination of banners and advertisements for your affiliate businesses and products.
About Brandon Leibowitz
