Effective Banner Ad Design
Banner ads perform two key roles:
- Qualified traffic
- Branding
Interestingly - research by Dynamic Logic infers that there has been too much concentration on generating and measuring the first at the expense of the second.
This has resulted in bad ad creative - creative which is either uninteresting, or fails to understand it's user's behaviour.
The focus has been on getting as many people as possible to click through who are actually going to convert when the get to the destination site (usually buy purchasing something or providing their details).
Makes perfect sense, right?
But with click-throughs (measured by Click Through Rates or CTR) dropping year on year, the obvious thing to do is to fall back to the traditional goals of advertising; brand recognition and message awareness (or ad recall).
So what makes a good banner ad:
- Get your logo up there and keep it there - but this is not a case of "making your logo bigger". Many ads use "reveals" and require the user to either interact with the ad, or to wait longer than they are realistically going to, in order to find out who's behind it. Research from Eyeblaster says that only 1 in 14 impressions will yield any interaction lasting more than a second - interactions mainly being mouse overs or clicks.
- Keep it simple - stick to one or two key messages and keep them short. Get to the point.
- Use video if possible: Both Dynamic Logic and Eyeblaster agree - ad performance and recall see a huge jump when video is added, particularly when used in small formats.
- Spend time on good quality creative: Not just at the concept phase, but make sure proper time and skill is spent on the execution - it shows and it makes a difference.
As one of the key differences in online advertising is the ease of measurement, and measurement can be addictive. But in the end you are targeting people, and the best way to grab peoples attention is with good quality work.
