Banner advertising is one of the most powerful forms of promotional methods on the Internet. Massive targeted traffic is possible, but you really do need to learn how to approach and execute well. The more experience you gain the fewer mistakes you will make, but the beginning can be a little rough. While we all prefer to avoid mistakes, they do happen; but with banner advertising your mistakes will also cause you to lose your ad investment, etc. There are a few mistakes that you will make – no doubt about that. However many mistakes are avoidable such as making sure you do proper research before your campaign. You want to minimize mistakes in your banner advertising campaigns, and we’ll help you by showing you three typical banner ad bloopers.
Although there are many banner advertising mistakes that can ruin our conversion rate, one in particular stands out and that is having an ad that is confusing or straight away misleading. You should know what is going on with the product/service you’re advertising, and don’t even use any gray paint in your ad. Your work is already cut-out for you before you even begin, and we’re talking about gaining trust with people. Your banner ad begins a story, or can, and then the rest of your marketing funnel carries on where the previous page left off. Make your entire funnel one long consistent experience, and if you do that then the person will feel more comfortable at each successive stage.
On the other hand, we do suggest that you avoid making your banners too ‘busy’ with too much in them. It only stands to good reason that people will naturally know what you’re talking about much faster if it’s not cluttered. If you’re branding your company, we recommend testing with and without your logo because people can see your logo on your site – but test.
There’s not much real estate in banners, so you need to make every pixel count as much as possible. You must hit their hot buttons right away, so be short and concise with your copy.
Until you know how a particular new traffic source will pan out, then start small and scale up the ad campaign. This is all really a no brainer when you see it all laid out, but it is understandable that new marketers won’t necessarily realize this. It is really simple because if the numbers don’t look good, then just walk away. Banner advertising is like all other forms of advertising in that you have to learn how to do it the right way – because there is a wrong way! There is much more to learn beyond the scope of this article, though. It’s okay to make mistakes because that’s how we learn. There are mistakes that are easy to learn about before they happen, so be sure to keep reading. That is why it’s so important to study and learn before doing.
