Maximizing The Power of Banner Ads on Your Blog

Posted by Shan in Advertising, Affiliate Marketing

This Guest post written by Shan from bannerweaver.com.

Have something to sell? Have something to promote? Need more subscribers to a service or mailing list? Internet advertising can be the key to accomplishing any and all of these goals. The best tool in your arsenal is the common, yet potentially amazingly powerful banner link ad.

Banner links can be a more powerful form of advertising than you may think. Ready-made banners are offered by most affiliate programs for downloading or copy and pasting code. The best way to get higher click through rates is placing these banners in the most efficient location on your page or pages.

Using banner advertising as part of a website is a very valuable source of income, and so is using text-based link advertising. Be sure to get the balance of the two correct. It’s important to place banners where they will be successful, and to put text link advertisements where they will get the most attention. Optimized click through and conversion rates are the key to bringing in plenty of money.

We will concentrate more on the banner advertising side. The success of affiliate banner advertisings and click through rates ( CTR ) is often based on the fact where a banner is placed, and what banner format you have chosen, how it is worded, the marketing power of the advertiser´s brand name or product, and the attractive and eye-catching qualities of the ad itself.

Keep your banners focused

Avoid using your home page or start page for banners. Instead, make use of banners focused on pages that are designed for or around a particular topic or affiliate product. For example, a pet site should display a cat food banner on the cat page, not on the page set up for chinchillas.

Size of banners

Marketing research has shown larger banners are more likely to create click through than the smaller pixel banners. The traditional 468 x 60 standard banner is one of the most successful formats.

Banner animation

Animating banners makes them more noticeable.  Movement will always be more interesting than a still picture, and animated banners even have the ability to increase response rates by up to 25%. Using these banners at appropriate positions, such as the top of your pages is absolutely fine, and in fact can be helpful.

There are a few ways this can backfire, though. If you are using flash animated banners, for example, make sure they do not obscure text or other content or move around the page . An increasing number of websites do such things, waving ad in the visitors’ faces and causing them stress rather than curiosity. There are some clicks on these banners, yes, but most of these clicks are only done accidentally by page visitors trying desperately to close the ad and get back to what they were reading or watching. After this they are unlikely to want to explore your site or buy anything from you. So make sure your animation banners are placed in such a way that they gain attention but still leave viewers with a positive impression of your products or services.

Banner Phrases

Choose the words of your banner ad wisely. They can be critically important to the success or failure of a banner ad. The best banners will demand clicks by using strong, commanding phrases, appeals like:  “Read all about…”, “Click here now”, “Money Back Guarantee”. This phenomenon is known as creating a “call for action”. While this is one of the older advertising tricks, it still works well and effectively. Creating a sense of urgency, saying it’s the “last chance” or that the “offer ends soon” can help push a viewer into action.

Asking questions that apply to most people, such as “Want more money?” or “Would you like to double your income?” are also excellent for generating a response and some sort of action. Be careful about saying anything is free, though – it gets you attention, but creates expectations that can be hard to satisfy.

Banners do best when they allow viewers to interact with them. An icon using Flash technology, for example, where a visitor can point the mouse over and click on it, has also shown to increase click through rates by up to 20%. Keep any flashing or other special effects to a tasteful minimum, though, because you will lose credibility if the whole website is blinking like Christmas lights.

Positioning of Banners

Contrary to what many internet marketers think, banners at the bottom of a page have a three times higher C.T.R. than banners at the top of the same web page. When people arrive at a page they are looking for information and entertainment, and not ready to go to some other site immediately. Once they have finished reading, viewing, or whatever else they came to the site to do, though, they are more willing to pay attention to an ad.

A very good positioning point also seems to be the lower right of the page, next to the scroll bar, which sometimes can more than double the click through rate.

Banner Loading Time

Only use fast loading banners. Banners should never be more than 12 KB in size. Banners that are not greater than 4KB have a 3 percent higher C.T.R. than banners with more than 10 KB in side. You will miss out on both clicks and page views if your banners take too long to load, making your complete page load more slowly as well. Search engines will also give slower loading pages lower ranks.

Refresh or Rotate Your Banners Frequently

Banners become less interesting to viewers quite quickly. Even Yahoo has mentioned that banners are burning out after about 2 to 3 weeks of use. Allow your site to change its look every once in a while when promoting a particular product.

Some affiliate programs allow for automatic banner rotation, but be sure that you have sufficient control to be able to keep all the different banner ads relevant, concise, and interesting. Otherwise all your previous hard work will have gone to waste.

Basically, when it comes to banner advertising, success is all about knowledge and testing for maximum effectiveness. Nobody can say for sure what works best for your particular site or page, only what is generally more helpful in getting the word out and the customers in, so take what you have learned here and find out how it suits you best.

About the author Shan

Shan has written 1 post in this blog.

Shan is co-founder of BannerWeaver.com - a site that specializes in designing Flash banners for you affiliate campaigns as as well as Ad campaigns, specifically, Adwords campaigns in Google's Display network.

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