Designing Banner Ads: 5 Things You Should Never Compromise On

The popularity of your website depends on how creatively it is advertised. This article sheds light on the basic rules of designing a banner ad.

If you are interested in doing online business, one of the issues you definitely have to think about is how to design the best ad campaign. When you are coming up with banners, for instance, it is often a good idea to ensure that they are designed in such a manner that they are effective. This way, the money that you end up spending on advertisement will not be wasted. When designing such advertisements, there are a number of basic rules that you always have to live by to make them work for you. Some of these include:

Make sure that the banner ad is not too large in terms of size

This is one issue that most people usually do not think about when they are creating a banner ad. For instance, you may decide to incorporate graphics that may be too large. The effect of this is that they will take much longer to load, and this will definitely not work for your marketing. Remember, if the ad does not load in seconds, most users browsing a site will simply not pay attention to it. They will scroll down to find what they were looking for in the site in the first place, and in this manner you will have lost a potential customer. The best thing to do, therefore, is to design the ad in such a manner that it loads fast so that it can catch a user’s site before he moves on.

Do not be too wordy

When meeting someone for the first time, it is often said that you have only a few seconds to make an impression on them. This can be extrapolated to the issue of online ad design as well. Most users will not take the time to go through a banner that is too wordy, and this means that you should try to minimize how much wording there is in the ad. Most experts agree that the optimum number of words you need to have in the ad is seven. The goal of these seven ads is to capture the attention of the users so that they can click the ad to find out more about what you have to offer.

Use clever wording

It is also very important that the kind of wording you use is optimized for success. Some of the words that are thought to be evocative include ‘affordable’, ‘cheap’, ‘free’ and ‘amazing’. If you go online, you will find that there are many ads that use these words or their modifications. There is a reason for this: these words capture the attention of many people.

Do not make the ad too elaborate

As is the case in many other aspects of life, less is often more when it comes to advertising. Of course, it may seem necessary to use strategies such as using many different colors to attract the attention of the person browsing. However, the fact that most users now associate brightly colored and flamboyant ads with cheap sites means that they are conditioned to ignore them. This is especially so when they are used to going online, which also means that they are likely to buy what you have to offer. Therefore, you should try to design your banners in such a manner that they are striking in appearance, but not too garish as to seem cheaply done.

Use images prudently

They often say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in many cases you can use pictures to do most of the communication in your ad, such that you will not need to write much more. Of course, when you are choosing a picture you are going to use on the ad, you have to do it properly. The picture should be related to the service or product you are selling, and it should also be of small size so as not to increase the general size of the ad too much.

In a nutshell, doing online marketing is something whose success depends on much more than just picking an ad and using it to say that you have something to offer. Marketing is usually a psychological rather than a visual art, and by following the above you can design an ad that will win the hearts and minds of your potential customers.

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Author: John Miller

John Miller the writer of this article. He is very much into online and digital marketing. He is working in a company called Webfirm, which deals in website optimization, hosting, social marketing and other services.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 at 10:30 am and modified by WebMaster View on Friday, March 21st, 2014 at 5:45 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.