10 Best Practices for Creating Effective Banner Ads

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6. Understand how Ad Positioning Works

You can achieve maximum optimization of banner ads depending on where you are placing them. It is important to know your target visitors and even more important to know that putting an ad in a very popular website with multiple other ads will only cause banner blindness where your ad may go completely unnoticed. Choose a more subtle placement for your ad on a slightly smaller site where your banner has a higher chance of catching the eye. Also, remember that branding depends heavily upon visibility. As an example, ads placed above the fold on a website attract more attention:

Therefore, it is of utmost importance that you give your banner ad placement enough thought before going to town with it.

7. Consider Banner Exchange

Banner exchange is a great way to ensure that your ads reach other websites, and hence gain more visibility. If you are using this exchange you have to remember to use sites that are compatible with your product offer and the ads you are placing for them on your site are in line with the general tone of your site.

8. Use Advertising Networks

Ad networks find an aggregation of ad space supply from websites and connect them with advertiser demand. Making use of these is useful because you get a detailed demographic study from them and this reduces your own research time. At the same time you know that your ad will be placed exactly where they will be relevant, and not on completely unrelated websites.

9. Keep in Mind Different Purchase Systems

You can use CPM (Cost per mile, also known as Cost per thousand impressions), where publishers earn revenues as soon as the ad is displayed (not even clicked) for the 1000th time. Or you can use CPC (Cost per click), where you pay only when your ad gets a click through. Thirdly, you can use CPA (Cost per action), where you pay only when the ad is clicked and the user performs the intended action (eg. Register for an account). For greater brand awareness, CPM works fine, but for greater traffic, choose CPC or CPA.

10. Use Tracking

Use tracking to measure the effectiveness of your ad campaign. The formula for calculating CTR is:

CTR= Number of times ad is displayed / Number of clicks the ad gets.

A higher number is better. In addition use web analytics like Google Analytics to gauge the following

I) Daily visit stats

II) Bounce rates

III) Unique visits

IV) Where your visitors are from

V) Keywords used to find your website

In spit of these tips, the mother of all tips still remains testing. Experiment and test your ads to check effectiveness every so often.

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