The Complete Banner Advertising Guide
Here is the quick skinny for a business looking at internet banner advertising as the next step in their online advertising plan. Whether it works for your business is a trade-off between the widespread appeal of your products, targeting available to reach your ideal audience, and the strength of your banner creative.
Banner Advertising vs Text Ads
Contrary to the first assumption, banner advertising doesn’t necessarily work better than text-based ads. The winner between the two for click-through rates and better quality traffic can vary widely from situation to situation. Furthermore, other aspects of a media buy tend to play more of an effect than the ad format (traffic quality, demo targeting, page position, message quality). Internet banner advertising is the hands-down winner for branding, however. A picture lets you reinforce your brand message on a user browsing past, who don’t necessarily click your ad, better than text-based ads. So, test test test and decide yourself which is working better for you.
Targetting CPM
Internet banner advertising can be purchased at a flat fee, or as cost per impression, cost per click, or even cost per acquisition. The most common Internet-wide is cost per impression. It is so common, some marketers think of CPM and banner advertising as synonymous (erroneously). For help understanding the differences, refer to “CPM CPC CPA explained.”
If you are purchasing CPM banner advertising, audience targeting is extremely important. Just throwing a banner out there for the entire web to view, at your expense, is never a good idea. You must ruthlessly assure that the people you have found are most likely to purchase your product are the ones viewing your banners. You can target by picking the websites where your banners appear or picking the users to target through other means such as cookies or demographics, and then displaying for them on whatever website they are currently viewing.
Outside of advertising in search, even the best audience targeting tends to be pretty broad. You can use advanced demographic cookieing and carefully choose the websites your ad appears on to make your bass boat banner only appear for users with high household incomes that are browsing fishing sites, and the targeting still won’t be as good as Google PPC. Google search PPC is targeting people you know want a bass boat because they search for terms like “buy bass boat”, “buy a fishing boat”, or “bass boat comparison”.
To succeed in a world of broad audience targeting, your product needs to have broad appeal. In general high priced products, products for niches, products with requirements (such as a high credit score), and products people won’t know they want until they need it (such as mould removal) will do worse.
Internet Banner Design
The content of your banner is, counterintuitively, less important but still essential. A rich still visual that realistically conveys your product or service is best. For example, a steak for a restaurant or a necklace for a jewellery shop makes for some of the best banners. If your product is more complicated, a good tagline can make up the difference. If you can’t adequately explain your entire product in one frame, don’t expect banner advertising to perform for you. While you can, and should, use animation and flash in advertising, spreading out an idea over multiple frames will dilute the effectiveness of your banner.
The final thing you need to know when stepping into Internet banner advertising is the importance of testing. Always measure and keep track of the click-through rates of a creative. Whenever possible, have an a/b test going, comparing different creatives. Internet advertising professionals will tell you hilarious stories about the silly unexpected things that can make a huge difference in click-through rate. Examples include changing the word “the” to “my” in a tag line, putting a colourful burst behind a price, or changing a banner background from blue to purple. Furthermore, what might work great in one banner, might do nothing in another. It’s not unheard of to start a big CPM spend with 10 completely different banner creatives, and tests to find the best one, then create 10 more slight variations and test again.
