The 7 Simple Ways You Can Significantly Increase Your Internet Banner Ad Click-through Rates

1. Gear the Design of Your Banner Towards Specific Sites

To maximize the effectiveness of your banner, it needs to reach a specific target market. When planning where to advertise your banner, you must find websites that are frequently visited by your target market and design your banner to accommodate the website.

Think of all of the times you have clicked on a banner ad. The ads that get clicked the most are the ads that essentially blend in with the website.
2. Give Your Banner Energy

Banners that use animation are going to attract attention and get noticed. Banners that are plain and simple will be overlooked. Using movement or having live action on your banner will drastically increase the number of clicks it gets compared to a banner with no movement.

*Make sure to avoid static banners that will only change when the webpage is refreshed or reloaded.
3. Use Inspirational Words

Certain words can inspire people even without them realizing it. Words that encourage a person to take action will often grab their attention and motivate them to at the very least explore the opportunity being presented to them. Something as simple as “Free” or “Help Needed” or even just blatantly saying “Click Here” will result in a higher click rate than banners without motivational words.
4. Test Several Different Designs and Analyze Their Results.

Don’t make the mistake of creating one banner and thinking you are done. Create several different banners using various formats and test each one out. Simple design changes in a banner can increase its click rate by up 10% or sometimes even more if done successfully.

After creating several different banners, test each banner out for a specified amount of time, more than a day but no more than one week. Make sure each banner gets a fair trial run. After analyzing the results, spend time experimenting with minor changes to the banners that had the most success. Don’t rush this step. A minor detail can make a major difference.
5. Hire a Pro

When banner ads first started appearing, anyone could create one. Times have changed. To make sure your banner can compete with the other advertisements out there, it needs to look professional. A simple Google search for professional banner ads will lead you to numerous professional artists that can help you make your banner look impressive to the public eye. Paying an artist a small fee to create a banner for you is one of the best investments you can make.
6. Minimize the Graphic Size of Your Banner

The bigger the banner the better, right? Wrong. The larger the banner is, the slower the webpage will load. A banner that is too big is going to result in losing a tremendous amount of clicks on your ad. Set a 15k limit for any banner that it not rotating. Rotating banners can be larger but know your limits.
7. Evaluate Evaluate Evaluate

You should be keeping updated with the progress of your banner on a daily basis. You want to set your goals high and eventually achieve at least a 2% click rate. This is very difficult to do but can be done. If your banner’s click rate ever drops below the average of 0.5% then you need to make some serious changes. If after a few days your banner is consistently producing an unacceptable return rate, it is time to change to a different version of the banner you created.

Never change more than one element of your banner at a time unless doing serious revisions. A single element may unknowingly be the key to the banner’s success or it may be the reason your banner is failing. Switching just one element at a time will allow you to take note of which elements are working well for your banner and which elements are not.

Experiment with your banners on multiple sites. You can then see which sites are producing the highest click rates and which sites have the highest conversion percentage. This process will lead to you advertising more with some sites and less with others.
Summary

Following these 7 simple steps will put you well on your way to having a successful banner ad. These techniques can be applied to other forms of online advertising and will work just as well. Remember, your target market not only needs to be reached, but also needs to be encouraged to click on your banner.

A banner is never finished; it is just finished for the moment. Changes can always be made. It is up to you to analyze your results and make any and all important decisions on your path to success.

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By: Naor

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