Banners - Tips to Improve Your Campaigns' Performance

[Mobidea]

Choosing a good banner is not an easy task. It’s not just about selecting your favorite color or matching some words. If a banner is successful and able to attract high volumes of quality traffic, you are in a good path to achieve a great performance. I can say that the most important decision of you as a media buyer is the choice of the ads to be placed in each campaign: you save money because you don’t need to pay too much to beat your competition and you gain more attention from your target. In other words, you can have the best offer, the highest bid, the most performing target, but if you don’t have an appealing banner, the visitors will never click on it. In this article I have the purpose of give you some key tips in order for you to optimize your creatives. There are just few adjustments to your communication that can solve many of your problems.

1. Who is your target?

Defining a good banner implies knowing and understanding your audience. Visitors from different countries, cultures or ages will react differently to a banner image. The same ad in different countries cannot have the same performance. The first thing you should do is defining your target. Who are they? Are they men? Women? Teenagers? Which language do they speak? If you are able to answer these questions you can adjust the copy of the banner, colors, design, and so on.
Example 1:

This banner was placed in a campaign targeted to Turkey. A banner adjusted to the most spoken language in that country (banner 2) had better results than the one in English.

1. Which is the spot you want to promote?

If you put the same banner in different spots you won’t achieve the same performances. A banner that works very well in the spot 300x250 (for example) doesn’t mean that it will be extraordinary in the spot 728x90. The same thing is true when we are talking about the zone (mobile top, mobile bottom or NTV).

Example 2:

These banners were tested in the Instant Message spot. This spot is like a chat window that appears at the bottom of the page and it can be understood as a notification to the user. For this specific spot, the banner with texts that induce an action (saying for example download or watch now) worked much better than the one with an image. Imagine you are navigating into a website with a lot of interesting videos and you want to click on them to watch. If it appears an image at the bottom of the page you will understand it as a suggestion or more related videos. On the other hand, if it appears a text you will understand it as an alert message and you are induced to click on it.

1. Which is the website or group of websites where you want to display your ad?

For some adnetworks you get the information regarding the websites in where your banner is shown, or in other words the publishers. If you are buying your traffic in those platforms you can surely improve your results. Different websites’ layout require different approaches when you are creating an ad. The banners should be incorporated into the website, that is, to be seem part of it. You don’t have to put big arrows or crazy animations to gather the user’s attention. You just need to navigate in your top websites, identify your top spots and defining an image that don’t seem to be an advertisement. You should adapt the color, the font size, the ad shape to the look & feel of the website or group of websites.

Example 3:

The banner 2 was created after a deep analysis of the website in which the campaign was targeted. In fact it is very similar to the videos shown in that website. If you are able to do the same in your campaign, you can definitively have better results.

There are a lot of other tips you can find in a large number of studies regarding this issue, however these are the most relevant and the ones that allows you to achieve better results in a short period of time. Try these tips and share with us your results.

 

[Ninja Marketer]

Absolutely superb post about banner placement along with A/B testing idea. This will definitely help newbie as well as pro marketers.

 

[TrafficBroker]

Super case study

 

[7Display]

Really useful tips

 

[Maxin]

Super high value information @Mobidea ! You just helped me launch a new campaign with better banner ads.

 

[bobdos007]

Great post @Mobidea ! I just hv a question ... What ad network you used in the test? Go2mobi, for instance, will not approve any of those banners. They say You can't just use a download button inside a banner, The banner should be clear about what the download button is about.
Do you know any adnetworks that will allow to run such download banners?

 

[Mobidea]

Great post @Mobidea ! I just hv a question ... What ad network you used in the test? Go2mobi, for instance, will not approve any of those banners. They say You can't just use a download button inside a banner, The banner should be clear about what the download button is about.
Do you know any adnetworks that will allow to run such download banners?

This test was made collecting banners from different adnetworks. From our experience we know that for example in Traffic Factory we cannot use these text banners, but from all the other adnetworks it is possible to promote them.

 

[Super Marketer]

Thanks, a lot. Just looking for this kind of experiment.

 

[mentat47]

If a banner is successful and able to attract high volumes of quality traffic, you are in a good path to achieve a great performance. I can say that the most important decision of you as a media buyer is the choice of the ads to be placed in each campaign: you save money because you don’t need to pay too much to beat your competition and you gain more attention from your target.