There are three key areas to focus on to ensure your ban­ner ad cam­paign is a success:

1. Define Your Objectives

a. Define what your over­all goal is. What do you want your mar­ket­ing cam­paign to achieve?

b. Define the role of online within the big­ger pic­ture. How does the online por­tion of the cam­paign fit within your over­all media plan? e.g. Is the role to drive direct leads, or to build brand aware­ness by com­ple­ment­ing your offline efforts?

c. Set your expec­ta­tions. What results will make you happy at the end of the campaign?

• Brand Lift: Peo­ple may be influ­enced by your ads even if they don’t click on them. If your ad com­ple­ments what is being done offline, it can be extremely effec­tive at mak­ing a last­ing impres­sion with your audi­ence, which can be mea­sured as part of a larger brand study encom­pass­ing all the campaign’s touch points.
• Traf­fic: Mea­sur­ing clicks is impor­tant if you’re look­ing to gen­er­ate traf­fic as clicks iden­tify how many peo­ple went to your web­site. But don’t for­get, some peo­ple won’t click the ad, but will visit the site any­way because of an offer they saw in your ad.
• Qual­i­fied Leads: Clicks and traf­fic aren’t every­thing. If your goal is to gen­er­ate qual­i­fied leads, you must mea­sure how many clicks con­verted (i.e. filled out a form, sub­scribed etc.) once they got to your site, or how many peo­ple called you after see­ing your ad.

2. Cre­ate Com­pelling Ban­ner Ads

a. Align cre­ative strat­egy to cam­paign objectives

• If you’re build­ing a ban­ner to gen­er­ate leads, cre­ate strong mes­sages that drive direct response. e.g. offers, calls-to-action (CTAs). To win the con­ver­sion, you need to tell users why they should click your ad.  What is the imme­di­ate ben­e­fit to them? Words such as ‘buy now’, ‘sale’, or ‘free’ will tempt users to click on your ad.
• If you’re build­ing ban­ners to lift brand aware­ness, think about lever­ag­ing cre­ative from your other brand assets to ensure that there is con­sis­tent mes­sag­ing between your online ban­ners and your activ­i­ties offline. Think about the way your ban­ner ads rep­re­sent your site – they should be an exten­sion of your exist­ing brand. Do not bring new brand ele­ments into a ban­ner ad as you may con­fuse users and miss out on extra clicks gained from brand recognition.
• Remem­ber, brand lift doesn’t hap­pen in being exposed to a brand once, twice or even three times. Some­times a con­sumer has to be exposed to an ad up to nine times before impact is made. Link­ing online and offline cre­ative is more likely to impact bran­dlift sooner.

b. Keep your mes­sage straightforward

• Use the lim­ited space wisely to pro­mote the one mes­sage that you want con­sumers to retain.  Clut­tered ads are a sure fire way to put off poten­tial traf­fic.   If you want to adver­tise more than one prod­uct, or have mul­ti­ple CTAs, run mul­ti­ple ads, do not try and fit it all into one.
• Best prac­tices for ad posi­tion are to have your ban­ner ads within the page con­tent, in the head­ing, or in the right hand col­umn for max­i­mum effec­tive­ness. Above the fold ads per­form better.
• If you have mul­ti­ple ban­ners on a page (e.g. home­page takeover), think about how each ban­ner can deliver to objec­tives dif­fer­ently. Too often adver­tis­ers take one cre­ative look and one mes­sage and adapt them to dif­fer­ent for­mats. Break from this mold to put a com­pelling mes­sage in the Header, put a com­pli­men­tary mes­sage in the Big Box, put sup­port­ing imagery in the Skyscraper.

c. Use your cre­ative imagery to cut through the clutter

• Web­pages are busy places. Your ban­ner ad will be com­pet­ing with sev­eral other com­po­nents on the page for the user’s atten­tion. You have lim­ited space, vis­i­bil­ity and size, there­fore keep­ing the ad to the point is crit­i­cal. Best prac­tice is to use approx­i­mately 2/3 of the avail­able space for the mes­sage, and the remain­ing 1/3 for the CTA. Avoid mak­ing the mes­sage too long.
• Your cre­ative needs to stand out from the rest of the page. Color and imagery are key to grab­bing your audience’s atten­tion. Beware that if you are run­ning the same ad on mul­ti­ple web­sites, what might look good on one site might not look good on another site. For the CTA, bright colours and click­able shapes are essen­tial. Avoid ban­ners with white back­grounds as these can get lost in the website.

d. Keep your audi­ence top-of-mind

• Remem­ber, users visit a page to see con­tent, not to see your ad. If you want to make an impact, you need to fig­ure out how to detract them from their orig­i­nal objec­tive (i.e. look at the page’s con­tent) and engage with your ad.
• Pro­vide con­tex­tual mes­sag­ing. Make sure that you’re push­ing your ad at the right time, in the right place and to the right peo­ple. You could have the best ban­ner ad in the world, but if it’s out of con­text, your cam­paign will not be suc­cess­ful.  e.g. if your ad is on a site where the user has just looked up a Prius Hybrid, you wouldn’t push a pick-up truck ad.

3. Track, Mea­sure, Mon­i­tor and Adapt

• Why you were run­ning the ad in the first place. Was it for bran­dlift, traf­fic or leads? Review your met­rics to deter­mine whether or not you are meet­ing your objec­tive. Remem­ber, if you decided that brand lift was your main objec­tive, don’t be sur­prised if you didn’t get any clicks!
• Don’t wait until the cam­paign is over to review whether or not it is work­ing. Online tools such as Google Ana­lyt­ics pro­vide real-time feed­back as to what is work­ing and what isn’t, so you can tweak your cam­paign. Sim­ple adjust­ments (e.g. back­ground col­ors, imagery or one word in the mes­sage) can make a major impact to the suc­cess of a campaign.

Avoid these two major errors:

• Build­ing an ad that doesn’t meet IAB stan­dards. Web­sites have built their ad slots to these stan­dards so if you’re not build­ing to these specs, your ad may not make it onto your site.
• Your cre­ative is great, your call to action is aligned with your objec­tives, but your land­ing page doesn’t fit with your call to action e.g. A French ban­ner ad links to an Eng­lish land­ing page.

This arti­cle was co-written by Jen­nifer Dunn, Alexan­dre Henault and Rebecca Maynes.


Biography / Resume : Rebecca Maynes is Mediative’ Marketing Communication Specialist, focusing on Demand Generation Communications. Using her expertise in creating and compiling engaging content, she captures and nurtures existing and new leads through the marketing funnel. Rebecca is responsible for the creation of Mediative’s monthly eNewsletter, case studies, and cheat sheets, and she also plays an integral role in whitepaper and eBook production. Rebecca began her career with Yell.com in England, and, after emigrating to Canada in 2005, she has gone full circle, joining Mediative, a Yellow Pages Group Company, in April 2009. Prior positions include Marketing for a B2B Software company. Rebecca graduated from Cardiff University in Wales, UK, with a First Class Honours BSc in Business Administration.