The Digital Arts Group: Innovative Graphics and Web Design

Banner Ad Design

In its simplest form, a Banner Ad is akin to an ad in a print medium, like newspaper, magazine or journal. However, one major difference between the two is that a banner ad can be interactive and since it is hyperlinked to the advertiser's website, when a user clicks on the page, he is led to another web page detailing his products and services advertised on the banner.

Banner ads can be animated and through clever design, they can be made to be interactive. A selling message can be presented in a compelling way with the objective of initiating an action from a potential customer and involving him from the first stage itself. Graphic elements when employed in a very creative way, can bring prospects directly to the website of the advertiser.

Typical banner sizes (in pixels) are:

One could design banner/panel based online advertising in two ways: Paid mode and Exchange mode. In Paid Banner Advertising strategy, one would typically buy spaces for a certain period or exposures on websites that attract high targetted traffic.

As opposed to the paid banner advertising, banner exchanges involve simply excahnging banner spaces with other websites. If you allow a website to place a banner ad on one of your webpages, you get space for your banner ad on that website. Banner exchanges are more effective when done with sites having similar profiles.

Features of a Successful Banner Design

The first and foremost thing that is important to achieve through banner design is its ability to generate ACTION. When a visitor sees your banner on a site, she must be compelled to click on to it. This can be achieved through effective use of animation, good, compelling copy, and its graphic design.

While using animation, however, one must be careful not to over-do it. Banners with too much animation can become distracting. An endlessly looping animation can be quite annoying and its best to have it settle down after 4-5 loops. Make sure your message is displayed on the last frame.

It must also be ensured that banners are quick to download. Its not just annoying for visitors to see something take ages to download but it can actually fail to achieve any results for you if the visitor is able to find relevant information and leave the page before your banner has even begun to show up on her screen.

As with any design, use an optimum number of colors. Make your ads pleasing to look at.

Pay attention to your copy. Make sure your messages are carefully worded. Don't make your ads verbose. Short, crisp messages can achieve high CTRs for you. Try and address concerns, offer benefits.

Some banner ads with high click through rates (CTRs) have words like - 'Click now', 'Get it here'. Another design idea that is known to achieve a high number of clicks from visitors, though inadvertantly, is the use of alert boxes or some similar windows application status boxes. An example could be an anti-virus company using a windows alert box saying: Virus like activity detected on this computer. Do you want to detect and remove virus? Yes No. A lot of visitors could mistake this banner for an alert message from their system and click on it.

Change your banners frequently as research has shown that CTRs for a banner ad drops significantly after a few weeks.

What does Banner Design involve?

An effective banner design can make or break your online campaign. To create a banner that is in sync with the rest of the elements of your campaign, we suggest a 6 point approach.

1. Define clearly your goals and expectations from your online ad campaign. Interpret, with reference to these larger goals, what your banner ad is supposed to accomplish - it could be take visitors to a more info page on your website, lead them to make a purchase, make a donation or simply fill up a registration form. It must also be considered at this stage, who your target segment is and what their demographic, socio economic classification, browsing habits, buying habits are.
2. Identify how best you can appeal to this target segment in terms of banner design. At this stage the design elements including the copy for the banner ad would be decided.
   
   If you feel you can target your customers best through market segmentation, then design a separate banner for each product/consumer category. Ideally, it is best to have multiple banners for each target segment. These banners could differ in their graphics, words or placement on sites.
   
   It may also be advisable to run each of these ads for a specific period of time and then measure results to see which type of ad works best with your target segment. It is highly probable that within your clearly defined market segments, different peope will react differently to each ad.
3. Link to the relevant page on your website. A common mistake in creating links from banner ads is to provide a hyperlink to the home page of the advertiser's website. Once a user has clicked on your banner, you do not want to waste your chance by taking him to a place where he has to sift through and find information that is relevant to him/ his needs. Now that he has made a 'considerable effort' by clicking on your banner ad, reward him by taking him to the page on your website that is most relevant to your expected results from that particular banner.
   
   It may be advisable to create pages with your banner ads and target segments in mind. You are going to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money in eliciting clicks from visitors. Make sure you have all your homework done when they finally reach your online store/ office.
4. Advertising space: It is advisable to buy advertising space on a site that attracts targetted traffic than on a web site that doesn't have a clearly demarcated visitor profile. Find out about the visitor stats, time spent by them on the site, their profile. Study and analyse these details in reference to, not only the website you plan to advertise on but also its specific webpages. The purpose of this analysis is to find out which pages have a higher probability of helping your banner ads achieve click-throughs.
5. Banner Rotation: This is somewhat similar to what they say in traditional advertising and promotion. Change your ads so that you retain the 'novelty' value and avoid banner burnout. Most sites offering banner davertising space have programs that rotate banner ads. You could also use this strategy to display different ads for different segments at say different times.
6. Quantify your results: Find out how effective your online advertising campaign was! There are some great products and services available on the internet that can help you measure the results of your campaign.

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