» Trendy Geek Marketing and Design Blog

Posts Tagged ‘banner ads’

How to Design a Banner for your Online Advertising Campaign

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

A web banner or banner ad is a popular form of advertising on the Internet. As you’ve probably noticed while surfing the Web, there are different types of banner ads. Banner ads are usually small image files in GIF or Adobe Flash format embedded on a web page, their presence on the Internet and their importance for many online business is immense. Banner advertisements appear on all sorts of websites and has different appearance and subjects, but they all share a basic function: attract eyeballs and clicks. Similar to a traditional ad you would see in a printed publication such as a newspaper or magazine, a banner ad tells website viewers information about advertiser, with the added ability to bring a interested customer directly to the advertiser’s website.Banner ads come in a different sizes, shapes and file formats. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) specifies different banner sizes according to pixel dimensions. IAB standard banner sizes are not the only banner ads used online, but they are a good representation of the range of common banner ads accepted by most websites. And the actual creative of banner ads varies considerably. The simplest online banner ad is a static GIF or JPEG image, with a HTML link to the advertiser’s home page.

Advertisers usually measure effectiveness of their banner ad performance base on click-through rate (CTR) — which describes the ratio of page views to clicks. It is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a particular web page who actually clicked on the banner ad after viewing. The typical click-through-rate is something under 1 percent, and click-through rates significantly higher than that are very rare.

The decreasing CTR of banner ads prompted a new crop of internet ads to be born. In order to capture more visitors attention, many banner ads are now designed using flash to add multimedia elements including animation, sound, video, game, and interactivity. These interactive banner ads often outperform their static counterparts by more than 200%.

Website visitors are more likely to notice banners that have moving pictures or fun and playable. Example: if you have a small flash game embed inside a flash banner, many visitors will play that game, and be redirected to your website after they have ‘win’ or ‘lose’ the game. Although interactive banners are usually larger in terms of file sizes, the popularity of broadband Internet connection has increased its popularity as most web surfers can now see these ads a lot faster than the dial-up era.

With so many banner ads on different websites competing for viewer attention, it is important to plan your online banner ad campaign carefully, and only place banners on related website to attract the correct target group of audiences. You can consider to outsource your banner design to professional banner designers, because an interactive, professionally design banner can perform significantly better than a static Gif banner, so to increase the return of your online advertising campaign.

Before you contact an online ad design company, ensure you have all the components you need to create your own banner ad first, including the text line, images, preferred color theme and landing page for the banner to link to.

There are many advertising agencies and professional designers you can contact online to create professionally looking banners, give you access to their design and programming skills, banner templates, and also their creativity and extensive experience.

Get Your Banner Ad Online Today with Design form Trendy Geek Design!

_____________________________________________________________________________
By Koi Fai Godfrey Ko. Visit banner-server (http://www.bannerserver.com/ ) to view banner templates gallery, or order a custom designed banner ad.

Tags: banner ad, banner ads
Posted in Branding, Marketing | 1 Comment »

Banner Ads Introduction

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Online banners or just ‘banner ads‘ as most people call them are in the company of the most favored and earliest forms of web advertising. The adverts which come in various shapes and size and are found all over the World Wide Web on lots of websites usually in the design of a still or animated gif graphic showing a certain business or website, similar to a television advert on a much lesser and grand scale. These types of adverts are displayed through website browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox.The banner links through to the advertisers website where more information can be found on that particular product or service.

Website banners have been around on the World Wide Web since near its conception and precede more dominant web advertising such as Google Adwords and other ‘Pay Per Click’ schemes.

The success of such marketing, apart from the overall rise of users on the Internet is helped by eye-catching and appealing graphics, titles and slogans. Some banner ads ask you to interact with the banner to get the user to click to the sponsor page.

Across the Internet there are many examples of banner ads on a continuous basis as you browse the web and can be found on popular websites such as Yahoo, Facebook and IGN.

Banner Ads are designed in lots of different sizes and shapes. Oblong, square, vertical and horizontal banners cover the Internet in sizes differing from 50 pixels to 1500 pixels and lots of combinations in between. Primarily the banner graphic were still images with images, graphic design and a catchphrase and some kind of text. More recently animated banner ads have renewed these, especially from advertisers with bigger budgets and include as many as five different ’screens’ of graphics, animation and text. Smaller companies and individual website owners do use banners however,yet they have become much less commonplace, especially on websites with high volume traffic as they are more expensive.

Lately differing types of banner ads have produced in line with new web technology and coding. This includes ‘popping-up’ banner ads that stretch over the website’s page that they are displayed on or that enlarge as the mouse cursor moves over the advertisements area. While many do not like the new concepts the ads are said to have an excellent success rate for their advertisers and will therefore remain a favorite for advertisers on the Internet.

Since the early 2000’s new types of Internet advertising have become popular, however large companies still include banner ads as part of their advertising campaign as well as the newer pay per click methods.

The cost of banner advertising depends onthe website they are shown on. As a general rule the more the host’s site’s traffic is the more the price will be to advertise your banner.

Banner graphics are in the form of jpg, png or gif files and animation is created using a Javascript with technology such as Java or Silverlight.

Some Banner Ad Inspirations:

Banner Report

CoolHomepages.com

And my favorite Banner ad: