Follow these tips to ensure that your banner ad achieves your marketing objectives:
- Make sure that your ad is quick to load. If the Web page loads in its entirety before the ad, then the viewer might click away before everseeing it. Ideally, you should have a very fast loading ad on a relatively slow loading site. This way, your viewers have nothing to do but readyour ad while they are waiting for the site to load. You should always try to keep your ad size under 5K.
- Keep it simple! If your ad contains too much text or animation, or too many colors and fonts, viewers experience information overload and will not be encouraged to read or click on your ad.
- If you are using animated ads, limit your ads to two to four frames.
- You should always include a call to action such as “Click here.” It is amazing how many people do what they are told. However, you still
have to make your ad interesting and one that grabs their attention. Don’t simply say “Click here”—give your audience a compelling reason to do so. - Test your ads with the different browsers, the different versions of these browsers, and at different screen resolutions to make sure that they look the way you want them to.
- If you know absolutely nothing about advertising and graphic design, do not try to create an ad on your own. Go to a professional. If you do design your own, get a second opinion and maybe a third.
- Have your link send your target customer to an appropriate landing page rather than your home page.