Though several elements are to be taken into consideration while designing a web banner ad, a designer has to give special attention to five aspects for the success of a banner design. The real success of a banner design lies not only its ability to draw large targeted audience, but also to prompt them to make a purchase of product/ service of the website owner. Here are the five most important points:
The first and the foremost thing a banner designer should consider while designing a banner is to make the file format small because if the gif or jpg file is large the banner will take more time to load and by that time the visitor would have scrolled down the webpage without even seeing the banner. So ensure that the file format is small, stays below 10K, 15K at the maximum. Sometimes it is very difficult to do, but by minimizing the number of animation, colors etc the designer can make the file light enough to reduce the load time.
Most of the experts agree that ‘Call to action’ is one of the simplest methods to raise the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) of the banner. ‘Call to Action’ is nothing but having the 2-3 small words “Click here”, “For more”, “More details”, “Sign up now” or something similar. All online advertisements include a link the purpose of which is to take the visitor to the advertiser’s website whereas the off-line ads such as radio, TV, billboards etc need the target audience just to watch or read the ad. Many people, being so much accustomed to off-line ads, fail to realize that web banners are actually meant to click on them to find more about the product/service on the advertiser’s website. Thus the effectiveness of a banner improves considerably with the ‘call of action’ words like “Click here”, “For more” etc.
People normally get attracted towards banner ads with moving elements a lot more than the static banners. Web banners are mainly designed to catch the attention of website viewers. Small animation is sufficient to meet this end because too many animation increases file size causing the banner to take more time to download and secondly, after a while it will annoy the visitors who are more interested to read an article or tutorial. If a banner with too much of animation irritates the audience, they are likely to leave without clicking on it.
A designer has to add good ad copy in the banner always because most of the fancy animation and pictures care only to catch the attention of the visitors, but they fail to prompt them to click on the banner. Actually it is the text that encourages the people to check out the product or service of the advertiser. Give maximum emphasis on the benefits, not the features of the product or service. Tell the audience how the product will help them to lead a much easier and happier life. Short and concise wordings are preferred and the words such as “free”, “proven” and “secret” have shown their ability to attract the viewers.
Present banner designers use various fake elements such as fake scroll bars, fake selection boxes, fake text links, fake text boxes, fake submit buttons etc in their web banner ads. Many latest banner ads with some kind of fake elements incorporated in them have shown positive results. Banner a such fake elements give a very good performance since the visitors think that they are clicking on a link to visit another page of the same website or they are clicking on a button, but in reality the people are clicking on a banner having the picture of a button and text link. Banner designers make these fake banners either by using the ‘Print Screen Button’ usually seen on a standard keyboard at its right side or by simply drawing buttons, scroll bars etc with the help of graphic programs. |
