Are you a web-totter, a geek or an internet savvy person? If you are any of these, then you most certainly would have noticed the ubiquitous, catchy little colorful web things (known as Banner Ads) that adorn the web in its own right. In fact if you have spent any time surfing lately, it’s unlikely that you have missed this popular form of advertisement, which although might differ in their appearance, subject matter and approach, in their basic function they are absolutely cohesive: a clickable patch designed to directly take users to the advertiser’s Web site. Clever, isn’t it? And good, bad, ugly: there are all kinds!
So What Are Banner Ads?
Banner ads are simple online advertisements whose importance in the internet medium is comparatively immense. Banner advertising offers complete support by driving in quality traffic that generates sales. In a friendlier lingo, a click is all it needs to click it big time!
But amusingly, in this ether medium that is frequented by almost 5 million banners everyday, only around 10,000 banners truly justify its being and live up to the expectation by bringing in traffic and sales. The rest are just money, time and effort wasted. Clearly, just making a banner or running a campaign is not enough.
Here are 3 must follow general rules and 2 essential tips that will help your banner be one of those 10,000, which makes it.
3 General Rules
1. Use as many creative versions you can think of: How many times have you experienced the phenomena of a particular banner working brilliantly for a week and then drastically dropping in margins? In fact if you are running a banner ad campaign it is very likely that you have. The reason behind such a change is plain old staleness. If you want your banner to bring in sales, change its creatives regularly
2. Tweaking and heavy optimization: It is necessary for you to duplicate your creative with a little tweak based on key factors like geography, time of the day, age group, etc. Why? Because different people will be attracted to different creatives. Make a set of banners and classify to which group of place or age group you’d want to target. Optimize accordingly and you’ll see how you get sales. Serving to specific people always helps in getting better ROI.
3. Do not trade volume for profit: Believe it or not, there is nothing called quick cash in this world. To get favorable returns, one must work hard. Do not over buy banner spaces and lower their margins. Keep quality buying space and increase their margin. Make a good banner with as many creatives as possible and keep experimenting on the same spaces. This will get you money on long term.
2 Very Essential Tips
1. Video Flash: Relax! It is not streaming video and paying for it. It is rather a simple flash files made to look like a video. People who have run campaigns have found this technique extremely useful and we’d go as far as to say that it works. Compress small clips and place it into a flash file, to be repeated over and over again. Visual communication doesn’t necessarily have to expensive.
2. Changing the campaign with unbranded creatives: Try to get permission from networks, although they won’t really like it, to not use their branded creatives and instead change it accordingly to where its clicking. Why? Because this way you’d be able to find out which campaign is earning a higher ROI and secondly it would alleviate your risks.
We need customers and not traffic. To turn your traffic into potential customers, you do need to follow a couple of rules that’ll assure you sales. Hence, if you are running a campaign that involves banners, make sure to check the above 5 points to make your banner bring in a 1000 sales for you.