Elements for Building a Successful Banner Ads Campaign

Banners ad is a form of online advertising where an advertisement is embedded into a web page to build instant brand awareness, drive traffic to the advertiser’s site and to generate leads. The banner ads may contain different action messages, but have the same objective- to get more users to click on them. It is a nice way of promoting your business, product or service to a targeted audience and generates a positive brand value to increase your business.

How to use banner ads effectively to promote your services?

• Know the Basic Terminology:

  • Page Views (Page Impressions) – this is how many times a particular page is called from the server, which is important to advertisers who place a banner on that page because it indicates how many visitors have possibly seen their ad. This is a measure of exposure rather than brand awareness and is a typical way of selling ad space – cost-per-thousand impressions, or CPM.
  • Click-through – the number of people who click on the ad linking through to the advertiser’s website. Ad space is often sold on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
  • Click-through rate (CTR) – this is the ratio of page views to clicks and is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a page who clicked on the ad. CTR is often very low, say 0.25 to one percent.
  • Cost-per-Sale – how much advertising money is spent on making one sale. This calculation will vary depending on the type of service or product.
  • Cost-per-Lead – how much advertising money spent on a sign-up or lead i.e. contact information of an interested consumer in the advertiser offer. It is the performance based pricing.

• Identify Your Target Audience:

  We have seen that sometimes the affiliate gets so much engrossed in setting up campaigns that he may stop considering the end user. For a successful campaign you should actually understand who your target audience is, and then structure your campaign in such a way that it appeals to that audience.

  Be very clear about:

  • The target demographics- i.e. Age, sex, Location
  • Where does your target audience spend their most of the time?
  • What do they like to do i.e. hobbies, interests?

• Do Not Mass Market:

  You should break your campaign into parts to fit in each traffic sources like online display, search based marketing, email marketing. However it is not necessary that a particular traffic source that brought great results for one campaign will be equally successful for others. Try different traffic sources to pull traffic and get the desired results and analyze what works the best for your business.

• Right Message Strategy:

  Apart from how strong your offers are or how compelling your landing page is, the ‘message’ of the Ad matters the most. Your message should be simple, unique and believable. The message varies enormously depending on what you are advertising and where the ad is placed. Sometimes an ad becomes more effective when placed at a granular rather than generic level such as the home page.

• Strong Creative’s Are the Soul:

  The theme of the banner ad must be unique and relevant; it must be ensured that the banners do not take a lot of time to open up. You may choose to have a simple static ad with limited graphics, or you may use an animated gif which means there’ll be some movement in your ad via the use of a succession of images or text. The fanciest banner ads are the rich media ads which use very creative graphics and may contain video, audio or specialist programming. These ads will have larger file sizes and may contain interaction beyond a simple click-through.

• Optimize! Optimize!:

  Once the campaign is live do not forget about it. Use every resource available to monitor, track and optimize your campaigns. Frequently analyze this data and make improvements wherever necessary to bring the best results. Replace low performing ads that are not profitable with higher performance ads . This will increase your overall profit margin and leave you with more to invest in new traffic sources to expand the business.