5 Best Practices to Maximize Your Display Advertising and Get Those Banner Ads Clicked
The chances of converting a prospect to a customer at their first interaction with your brand are extremely low. Consumers must encounter a brand ten times before they think about doing business with them. So, your marketing efforts must focus on connecting to the right audience at the right time. And as the number of potential marketing channels continues to grow, your customers could be anywhere. Designing a multi-channel (or cross-channel) marketing campaign with a seamless display advertising strategy is key for reigning first-rate customers.
In its ability to effectively target and retarget your audience, display advertising allows you to raise awareness early in the customer journey and attract repeat customers back with targeted offers boosting your marketing’s effectiveness.
To put it simply, the goal of your digital advertising efforts is to create banner ads that draw attention to themselves and entice a user to your website.
Here are 5 top best practices to help your banner ads increase impressions and get clicks.
1. Be Clear & Concise
Whether it’s a brand, a product, a service, or an offer, users should understand who you are and what you are promoting. Ensuring clarity in the branding and messaging should also be consistent across all ad sizes, ensuring that each part of your ad can stand on its own.
Brand recall is 59% higher for branded content than other digital ads. By keeping your banner ad content clear and concise, you have a better shot at being seen and your message remembered by a user who only saw your ad for a quick moment.
To help get noticed, it’s important to use headings and subheadings in your text and plain language that can be easily comprehended. Having an essential understanding of who your audience is will help you shape the best language to grab the attention of busy users and drive results from your ads.
See how Adobe, best known for its suite of software for creative professionals, understands the importance of having eye-catching visuals in its banner ads.
Keeping the message simple with easy-to-comprehend text and compelling calls to action, Adobe’s use of colorful images in their display ads targets the company’s artistic audience, remaining true to the brand’s message.
2. Attract with Animation
It’s important to remember that display ads don’t have to be static messages, especially when you consider the recent reports stating how video ads are the #1-way consumers discover a brand they later purchased from.
When it comes to video-based display ads, you need to grab your audience’s attention right away. Viewers are constantly scrolling and short on time and attention. As users look at the screen, an animated ad can draw their attention away toward what you want them to see.
That’s why this digital campaign ad we helped Cirrus Aircraft create was so effective: the executions make the first few seconds count. The ads also focus their messaging on the product’s emotional and practical benefits with a simple, direct approach, making the audience more likely to engage.
3. Call-to-Act Consistently
No matter how great your ad looks or how much a user likes to look at it, you won’t get responses if you don’t give the user the next step to take, a call-to-action (CTA) to “Start Free Trial” or “Download the Whitepaper.”
The sense of urgency a CTA provides can be a substantial psychological decisive factor to drive a user to click on your banner ad. Using words like “START TODAY” or “ACCESS NOW” prompts the user to click on the banner ad.
Check out how Oracle, the database management company, provides this sense of urgency on their banner ads with actionable CTAs. And how they make the call even more pressing by placing a mouse arrow on the button.
4. Target Strategically
Your ads are meant to attract your specific audience, so you need to place them on sites where they’ll thrive. You want their demographic to match your target audience as closely as possible. Effective display advertising focuses on the audience-first buying approach. Anywhere your audience goes online, the ads will go too.
Therefore, you should select placements based on where your target audience spends their time. Where do they go to read up on the news and learn about the problems you can help them solve? What social networks do they use in the context of what you are selling?
Once you have websites in mind, you can contact them directly or see if they have any advertising guidelines or programs listed on their website. By buying exclusive placements from a website that aligns perfectly with the interest of your audience, you benefit from the custom and deep integrations that are not able to be purchased any other way.
It’s also important to retarget users who have already interacted with your website or content. There are two free Google Analytics methods for gathering user data from your website. You can use either Universal Analytics or Tag Manager, but be careful not to use both to see where your website traffic is coming from. (Both use the same JavaScript code to gather data, it’s only that Tag Manager makes it easier to customize the code with additional tags.)
Take a look at how we added more incentive to the programmatic ads in this Optimum Business digital campaign. The audience engagement level shifts from the initial impression and clicks through to a retargeting lead.
5. Test and Refine
Many marketers dismiss a campaign as a failure after creating a handful of ads that don’t deliver the CTR or conversions they want. But as data-driven marketers know, you can’t improve results in the future without the intel to guide you. That’s why it’s vital that you A/B split test your ads. Campaigns that are A/B tested will typically perform better than those that are not.
And though there are many various elements on a banner ad that can be tested, a successful split test consists of changing one variable at a time. Here are some of our quick recommendations to help you test:
- Change the headlines from a statement to a question or highlight a fact about your product.
- Insert the word “free” in your copy or offer a promotion or some other time-sensitive incentive to increase interest.
- Revise your CTA to include more actionable words like “buy now” or “download and share.”
- Test out buttons that are of different sizes and colors.
Designing high-performing banner ads can be a challenge. But, when you test often, you’ll start to notice patterns that you can use to inform your future campaigns, and the process will feel a little easier every time.
Our team at Bloom Media understands what it takes to yield widespread and targeted exposure across the web to improve the ROI for the brands we work with. If you want to achieve the same success from your own display advertising campaigns, contact us today.
