Heatmaps from eyetracking studies: The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements.

Such banner blindness means that users want to find what they are looking for quickly, and get away from the webpage to more important things, or they want to read content in depth without letting ads distract them. If the situation is this, how do banner ads work then? They work because every so often a banner is interesting enough for the user to give it some time, and if the banner does not have what it takes to be a great banner, the user will go away just as soon. Multiple elements go into making a banner eye-catching and attention-grabbing, and these elements work together to make your banner campaign a success.

An Appealing Punch Line

No banner is complete without a catchy punch line that can attract users to click on the banner. The punch line needs to be intelligent, relevant and no more than a few words, displayed in the right colour and font in order to really grab the user’s attention

Include Your Logo and Web URL

Ad campaigns are also brand-building exercises and that is why it is important to include both the logo and the web URL of your business on the banner. However, remember that the user wants to know what you can offer and not how well-crafted your logo is, so try to keep a corner on the right or left side of the banner for the logo and the url and keep the rest of the banner for images and copy.

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The landing page is where your visitor will hopefully become a customer by making a transaction. One of the most important things that will help the conversion is the security on the page. Transactions made on your landing page must be secure with HTTPS. Regular web pages use HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) while pages that require secure transactions use HTTPS where S stands for Security. It is also a good idea to add a secure code like 3-D Secure to provide security for online credit and debit transactions.

4. Are You Transparent Enough?

Make sure that your customer knows what to expect. List down your product cost and other affiliated charges, and give a full total at the time of billing. Provide a secure shopping cart and send out an auto-email after the transaction informing the customer of the purchase and how long it will take to ship the product. Inform him about returns and refunds, and all clauses associated with them. Make sure there are no hidden costs or clauses that the customer thinks you duped him about.

5. Have a Privacy Policy

A privacy policy largely goes unnoticed on most web pages, but having one still ensures that the customer knows that his information will not be resold by you. While a short policy document is fine, it is advisable to have a legal document outlining exactly what information is protected and how, and what the customer should do to make this possible. This takes care of the loopholes in legality that are possible in a short policy document.

6. Show Off Your Testimonials

We humans largely go by word of mouth and reading about the satisfaction of another customer from your services will go a long way in convincing your potential customer that you are indeed what you promise to be. Include as many testimonials as you can on the landing page so your visitor knows that he can trust you to be honest.

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1. Where Can Your Customer Get in Touch With You?

For the most part all of us like to deal with a real entity. The way to assure your customer that you are real and that your business is real is to provide your address. An email address works fine, but a physical address builds credibility even better. That way your customer knows that where you are in case he needs to get in touch with you. If you are worried that giving out the real address of your business might get you the wrong kind of attention use a post box number. It is very easy to rent a mail box and you can retrieve mail from there without having to actually give out your office or residential address. In any case, the point is that the trust factor goes up a few notches the moment your customer sees that you are a real entity with a proper physical address.

2. Where Can Your Customer Call You?

As an extension to the above tip, a phone number will also make your customer see that you prefer transparency when doing business and are not afraid of being traced. More often than not business owners take a separate mobile or fixed line to answer customer queries, and you can also do this if you do not want to share your personal or office number with customers. Customers often prefer direct conversation if they think emails are not effective enough, and older customers most often prefer to talk directly rather than use the internet to make a deal. Some customers say they can judge a businessman’s honesty from his voice and how he answers questions. This direct communication can build more business than scores of emails, so definitely give a phone number on the landing page.

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Having decided on the kind of advertising you want to do, you need to know about the different kinds of advertising relevant to the media you are using.

1. Pop-ups and Pop Unders: Usually blocked by most browsers, pop-ups and pop-under ads can still be used in the form of Hover ads that combine a banner ad and a pop-up window in a transparent layer. These cannot be blocked by a standard pop-up blocker. Pop-under ads are also effective because the user sees them only when closes the main window, and therefore it means that his attention is free for the ad.
2. Rich Media Ads: Interactive rich media ads can include games, videos, rollovers, expanding, transitional and takeover ads. An interesting ad can hold the viewer’s attention, especially if there is a higher level of interactive elements in it.
3. Video advertisements: Using videos to advertise a product, or even using Ad sense on an existing video is fast becoming a preferred choice for advertising. Internet users often browse through videos relating to a wide range of topics, and a discreet ad on the video can get a lot of these users to your landing page.
4. Widgets: Promotionals are often advertised in widgets. They contain a short text to tell viewers about a product and have a call to action. Viewers then get to the landing page for more details on the promo.
5. Hybrid Ads: Hybrid ads contain customised solutions with branded promos, interstitials, sponsor messages along with entertainment content.
6. Roadblock: An expensive short-term solution is to buy all the advertising space on a webpage for a limited time, The metrics are similar to a TV media buy and is effective when ,multiple websites run the ad concurrently and therefore roadblocks are very effective in grabbing exclusive viewer attention and engagement.

In the world of online advertising, the most important aspect still remains how you plan to circulate your ad. You may use any of the above methods, but at the end of the day, if your targeting is incorrect, these are bound to be ineffective. As the following chart will tell you, targeting is what advertisers will spend most on, knowing that will get them better ROI, and once that is in place, choosing the mode of advertising is a call anyone can make.

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Heard the saying “make hay while the sun shines?”  This is your opportunity to make hay. The world of display advertisements now looks so promising that only the blind will miss it. But before you seriously consider putting any egg in this basket, read our field guide to display ads.

What kind of advertising?

Online advertising is a versatile medium and any of the following modes, or even a combination of these types can work for you:

Email marketing: Email marketing is directly marketing a commercial message to people using electronic mail. It can be done through

1. Newsletters: These  are direct emails sent out on a regular basis to subscribers
2. Transactional Emails: These send out transactional information about the action that caused it, and have 51.3% open rate (3) and therefore are more effective than newsletters
3. Direct Emails: Sending out an email to pass on a promotional message

Mobile Advertising: Mobiles today are complicated devices akin to a little computer. Advertising on mobiles is estimated to grow at a compound annual rate of 43% to € 8.7 billion in 2014 (4). Types of mobile advertisements include:

1. Mobile Web Banners
2. Mobile Web Posters
3. SMS advertising
4. MMS advertising
5. In-game advertising
6. Audio Jingles
7. Full-screen Interstitials

In addition to these, there is the option of using small banners in Messengers, ads in Internet TV (a relatively uncharted territory still) and Adware. What you will use depends on your product and your budget for placing the ad, but usually a combination of some of these methods work well for effective marketing.

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1. Can I design a good RMA to suit my site or do I need to outsource it?
2. If I am outsourcing it, how much does that bump up my budget by?
3. What kind of RMA am I looking for, and what size can I manage with?
4. Do I want it to be a simple rollover or a complex mini-site type model?
5. Do I really need the RMA? Does my product need interactivity to be marketed or are .gifs enough for its marketing?

An honest answer to these questions will often tell you that RMAs may not be what you need right now. If your product has still not taken off and you are still advertising on smaller sites, be advised that RMAs may not be supported on these sites. In such cases, it would be a far wiser idea to stick with static advertising using images. If, however, you think that your product can now be helped by some RMAs, do not put all your eggs in that basket alone. Like any form of advertising, RMAs are not fail safe. This means that a wise marketer would understand the need for a multiple pronged approach to advertising and not spend the entire ad budget on creating RMAs that may, at the end of the day, not work sufficiently.

It is easy to fall into the temptation of using RMAs but the truth is, it is still the future of advertising. The smaller businessman might still have to make do with an interesting static ad for his product because there is still a long way to go before RMAs become the preference. But if you are already up there and want to use RMAs, no matter what, keep in mind that there still are size restrictions, and even now most sites are not equipped to support RMAs.

*RMA = Rich Media Advertisement

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So what is rich media advertising? Is it in-page and pre-roll video rich media? Is it mobile video advertising? Is it in-game advertising? Podcast advertising? Yes, yes, yes and yes. The internet is now a tool to increase branding and awareness and with the consistent rise in bandwidth, rich media is everywhere. Technologies like video, audio, Java, and vector graphic (Flash, VRML) have existed before but the term “rich media” really got these things together in relation to advertising. Pushed into the mainstream by Suzanne Brisendine of Intel, Allie Shaw of InterVu and Mara Lapacis of Channelseven.com, rich media is now fast overtaking static advertising as the be-all and end-all of digital advertisements.

Rich media ads have performed dual roles since their advent on the internet. In advertising terms, these roles are called lean back and lean forward. RMAs that require an action to display are the lean back ads and those that often start playing even with an accidental rollover are the more aggressive lean forward ads.  Back in the days when dial-up was the way to go, such aggressive lean-forward RMAs that loaded 50k of content before the page loaded were difficult to work with. This brought in guidelines about limiting the size of rich media ad files.

But these guidelines vaporized, almost, when dial-ups gave way to DSL, cable, T-1, T-3 and other broadband services. In February 2001, IAB intervened using the interactivity of RM ads to lay down that when a prospective customer makes an action can three additional streams of up to 50K can load in the ad space. This is to say that RM content can now be sent on demand. The point was to save uninterested visitors from having to pay for the duration of the loading of an ad.  However, RMAs could not adhere to this because it is not a standardized size concept. Therefore sites laid down further guidelines about the kind of RM sizes they could support. In the absence of standardization, it still remained difficult for ad developers to create interactive advertisements.

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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 advertier 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 1000^th 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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1. Subtle Animation

Animation may be a great way to attract attention but can be easily overdone. A good banner ad has subtle animations that do not irritate the viewer. Animations that loop a thousand times a minute and run across the screen can cause banner blindness and very long loading times. Use tasteful animation that loops at a medium pace and then freezes on the most important shot.

2. Loops

Fast looping of banner ads slows computers down and increases the loading time. The IAB guidelines have laid down that banner ad animation cannot exceed more than 15 seconds, including loops. Have the animation complete three cycles of looping before it stops because by then the visitor would have seen it at least once, and extra looping may be completely redundant.

3. Go easy on expandable banners

When you rollover or click an expandable banner, a new DHTML appears with the new expandable banner displayed. More often than not, visitors find this extremely annoying and want to exit as soon as they can. Therefore, if you are using an expandable banner, make sure that the longest it stays open is three seconds. Better still, make these ads expand only when the visitor wants to see them, and have a clear “Close” tab on the banner for a quick exit.

4. Use Rich Media Banners Sensibly

Rich Media banners are like mini applications that help your visitors get more information than they would on a sequence of .gif files playing on loop. While they are great advertising tools attracting more clicks, these ads use multiple media and therefore load slower. The IAB has severe guidelines relating to use of RM ads, and those, in addition to the effort and money required in creating them, make RM ads best left to ad campaigns with a huge budget and planning.

5. Remember Your Landing Page

When you are creating an effective banner advertisement, it is important to envision what your landing page should be like. Your landing page is where your banner redirects visitors and therefore it should

A. Relate to the banner advertisement that redirects to it
B. Have multiple calls to action
C. Contain the same offer as the ad in more detail
D. Lend credibility to your campaign by including a contact detail.

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In the world of advertising, your budget most often causes the biggest conundrum. Like Lord Leverhulme once famously said:

“I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half.”

Your advertisement budget will depend on the form of business you have, and can range from 1% to nearly 10% of your sales. At the initial stages it might be a good idea to keep your advertising costs low, but once you have established some stability and your product returns a predictable sales pattern, you may want to amp up your advertising budget to the industry average. Or you could use any of the other marketing techniques that you think might work, but you definitely need to avoid a residual approach to advertising. What this means is that you need to understand that advertising is a necessary part of business, and associate marketing objectives with the level of advertising.  This will automatically have you invest in the right amount of visibility.

3. Avoid Premature Optimization

Optimizing a small ad campaign is a colossal waste of time, effort and the oh-so-important money. You can anyway judge the trajectory of your campaign only after you have run into a million or more impressions, and only then does further optimization and a bigger investment matter. As Donald Knuth said:

“Early optimization is the root of much evil. “

The idea is to sit tight on the optimization itch till your campaign has had a realistic number of impressions which may now influence your decision about how to optimize it, or what needs to be changed. Before that, it might be a better idea to wait and watch.

4. Implement Conversion Tracking

In order to transmit conversion information, you need to add a tracking pixel that gives you the tightest feedback loop.  This means that you add a 1×1 pixel image, also called a web beacon, to relay information about a page view. Assuming that you are a smart marketer who needs to know everything possible about his product and ad campaign, this can be your most handy tool. Another advantage is how you can tweak your campaign for higher returns through web beacon realyed information.

5. Control Your Traffic

Find out about the source of traffic and then weed out what is not relevant to you. Enable viewing from better websites, and control more as your traffic stabilizes. Higher quality traffic would mean a chance of higher CTRs, and therefore optimization if of paramount importance here.

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