7 Ways to Make Your Banner Ads More Clickable

When I was a student and then when I use to come across banner ads I took them as nothing more but usual ads! That’s it! However, when I started my career and stepped into the digital marketing industry, whenever I saw the banner ads I used to think I don’t know why people waste their money on such things as they reflected more spamming than advertising.  As I told I was new in the industry, had learnt some very robust & creative forms of digital marketing tactics! 🙂 🙂 However, gradually when I started embarking upon some really very interesting, meaningful and relevant banners on web I started realizing its worth. And! Now when I have spent almost a decade in the industry and I can see around, almost 9 out of 10 marketers have a part of their online marketing budget dedicated for banner ads that will remain one of the most productive forms of marketing on web. Banner ads aren’t just affordable but also measurable and effective medium to improve brand awareness. Doesn’t mean now I don’t come across some really very poor, clumsy & useless banner ads that make me to believe the rumors of banner ads being dead however that will remain the rumors and not the facts. Let’s have a look to a few stats that may sound against banner ads but they are against poor banner ads actually:

• 31% of banners served are not even viewable – comScore
• 92% of the viewable banner ads are simply not noticed – Nielsen
• A whopping $11.7 billion was wasted on display ads in 2012 alone – OnScroll

Did you notice, all the three stats revealed about the poor design, irrelevancy or misuse of the all-so-effective medium of marketing – Banner ads. To make any form of advertising viewable you need to have a good design & placement of its components; to make noticeable, it has to be relevant; and to avoid its misuse leading to wastage of money you need to optimize them with the help of analytics & testing. If conducted well, display advertising can be very powerful & competitive medium of driving awareness, site traffic, and conversions. Here are a few tips on managing your banner ads well.

Create & display targeted ads 

This will help any forms of marketing and banner ads even more, for they are short-lived! You show your ads to people who are looking for things related to your product or service. This is what targeting mean!  Obviously! If you will show your ads to those who are in a different hunt, why would they ever click your ads until your ads are overly attractive or compelling to be clicked. This is why every marketing Guru always suggests displaying banner ads on mainly highly targeted niche websites if you want to have good results for your promotions.

Keep it short, succinct & lucid

At this point of time when we have spend more than a decade working on digital marketing tactics I think I don’t need to tell you keep your copies attractive & soothing to eyes! That’s something as obvious as it could be! But the idea is not very thing that’s designed attractive can attract people!  A lot more factors are involved along with design such as fonts, length of the ad, text to image ratio, relevancy & so on. You need to keep in mind that the fonts you have used are larger in fact to catch the eyes of the viewers; you have not stuffed the ad with texts and that it not taking more than 2 seconds for the viewers to read it. Moreover, make sure your ads complement the website design at the same time.

Loading speed shouldn’t be slow

Your ads shouldn’t take forever to load ensuring the consumers to be repelled forever. Always keep in mind keeping the banners ads within the maximum file size they can be. Try not to include very complex animations & design elements making the ads so heavy that they take too long to load.

Pay utmost priority to relevancy 

Whether it is the landing page your ads are directed to or the images & graphics that you have in your ads, everything should be relevant. The product or service that you are trying to endorse through ads must be apparent through your images & graphics to avoid any confusion in the kinds of consumers. Moreover, digging out information hidden on your website could be a very frustrating and that may lead to the customer leaving your website lifting the bounce rate for your website. Make sure your ads are directed to a very relevant landing page talking about the offer that you ad displayed.

Focus on Branding

Always try to include your branding elements such as the company logo, tagline & so on in your ads as that help the consumers in recognizing your brand easily as well as enhances your brand recall value.

Pick your call to action (CTA) for ads well

Believe it or not but that just one word CTA can change the fate of your ads. It might make your ads to sound like a crude sales pitch however if picked well can give a lot of value out of your ads to the consumers. Put yourself in your customers shoes and ask yourself as to why would you click o the given ad, is there something you are going to gain access to or rewarded with and so on; and then decide your CTA instead of simply using words like ‘click here’ or so.

Last but not the least! Test your ads!

Even a simple banner ad would require you to work on a lot factors that are involved such as images, graphics, text, CTA etc. and the idea is all equally matters along with various other factors like their placement, quality, look et cetra. Try testing different variations of your ads to figure out what works well! Find out whether the change of that one or two factor changes your click through rates and optimize your ads respectively to gain best results.

Afterword!

Display your banner ads prudently utilizing the space on web well and reap maximum ROI!  🙂 🙂