When thinking about the subject of advertising, many people will immediately think about billboards, television commercials, and magazine spreads. While those are all significant, there is another form of advertising that has risen in prominence and continues to grow in popularity: banner ads.

What is a banner ad?

A banner ad is, essentially, an ad that is displayed along with website content on a web page. The banner ad here displays the Coca-Cola logo and the words “Got Milk?” The website content is additional information about the product. In some situations, the banner ad can be a combination of both advertising and useful information.

Why do websites use banner ads?

Websites use banner ads for many reasons. One of the most significant is that they offer a cheap and easy way to get more eyeballs on their content. When a user lands on a page with a banner ad, they typically have no idea that they are being advertised to. Therefore, the advertiser is able to get their message across without being too obvious.

How do you create a winning banner ad campaign?

To create a successful banner ad campaign, you need to approach advertising in a slightly different manner than you would traditional advertising. You don’t want to spam people with ads, but you also don’t want to appear too pushy, either.

Here are five tips for creating a winning banner ad campaign.

1. Test different headline and body copy

One of the first things you need to do to create a winning banner ad campaign is to test different headlines and body copy to see which one converts the best. You can use tools like Google Adwords to easily find the best performing headlines and body copies for your ads. Once you have your top performers, you can move onto the next step.

2. Optimize for the search engines

Another important thing to do to create a successful banner ad campaign is to make sure that the ads are optimized for the major search engines. When people use search engines to find information online, the results that appear on the first page are often from websites with a high engagement rate and quality content. These types of websites generally have strong SEO which, in turn, improves the likelihood of a user arriving at your site from a search engine.

3. Measurement is important

Measuring the success of your ad campaign is extremely important. Even if you have the best performing headlines and body copy in the world, you won’t know what impact they had if you didn’t measure it correctly. Google provides you with a variety of metrics that you can use to track the success of your campaign. One of the most important is CTR (click-through rate), the percentage of times that a person clicked on an ad while on a page with content related to the ad.

4. Mobile users are the future

People increasingly use their mobile phones for everything from banking to shopping and social media. As a result, websites must adopt mobile-friendly designs and ad formats.

If your site doesn’t appear beautiful and functional on a mobile phone, you’re losing out on a large audience. While desktop users have decreased in number, mobile users have increased in number, so it’s critical you take this factor into account.

5. People actually read the ads

Finally, you need to make sure that your ads are interesting and well-written. Even if your headline and body copy are the best in the world and perfectly optimized for a search engine, if the ad does not appeal to the reader, then it’s like putting a sign up that says “Buy Me!” The sign may attract a few birds, but it’s not going to attract any cats. Your readership is much more valuable than a few online sales. Ensure that each ad draws in and holds the reader’s attention.

At the end of the day, nothing beats effective and relevant marketing, whether it is through the use of banner ads, social media, or some other form of online marketing. To ensure that your efforts are paying off, measure the success of your ad campaigns regularly with analytics tools and track how each campaign is performing to determine which methods are delivering the most profitable results. With the right approach, you can be sure that you’re always putting your best foot forward and giving your business the best shot at success!