The following guest post was submitted by Shrihari from GotChance – a Geek’s Blog.
Advertising campaigns are undoubtedly one of the best sources of traffics from other high traffic website. Especially on huge blogs like TechCrunch, EnGadget etc.. and even on other big blogs like ProBlogger, John Chow etc.. There are primarily two factors that affect the click through rate of your banners :
- Position of the banners
- The Look and Feel of the banners
The second factor is what we will be discussing about in this post. So, how to design your banners and how not to design your banners ?
Informative Ads
The ultimate aim of every advertising banner is to tell the readers as much information as possible and get them to visit your website. This works for most banners, but sometimes turn negative. Especially when there is too much information, it maybe a turn off for the users. Consider these two banner :
The first one is stuffed with information. It looks attractive and people might be interested in clicking it. But, the second one, though it provides more information than the first, looks less attractive. With such a look, i might consider it as a SPAMmy ad.
Attractive Ads
While it is information that should work, what really works is the look of a banner. The more pleasing it is to the users, the more is the probability that he will click-through.
In the above ad, with the 300 x 250 large space offered, the advertiser could have easily included a lot of information about what they offer and also their domain name. But it simple reads “WordPress Themes for Free”. Also the WP logo looks very nice. So, i bet there would have been a lots of clicks on this one. It is always a good practice to hold back some information from displaying on your banner. The content that you should hold back, however, depends on what product you are advertising.
I found the following ad good-looking as well. It doesn’t say anything about what is being advertised, but can encourage a few clicks (though not as much as the above wordpress ad).
How & How not to color your Ads
A Banner can be made attractive(?) by two ways. One is by making it look good and the other is by making it ugly. An ugly looking ad would get more attention than a good-looking one. But, what the user feels is more important. While coloring ads, it is best to follow the color scheme of your own website (the one that the banner will be linking too). Also using some contrasting colors would be a nice practice. Not as contrasting as this one though :
So, it is always best to keep in mind the above points while designing banners. Also remember that “Success of a Banner = Information + Attraction”.
Have you had experience in designing Banner Ads? – What have you found that works (and doesn’t work)?
