Creating an effective strategy for banner traffic media buying is straightforward, but it’s important to consider unique angles that lead to more success.
Recently we put up two important quick guides:
Both guides are very quick reads that will give you a basic understanding of how to set up a campaign and optimize it. Before you read more of this post, you should make sure you have a solid understanding of those two things or you may get lost.
With that being said, let’s touch on a few points today that will improve your banner campaigns specifically. These crucial factors are often overlooked when running banner ads, but shouldn’t be.
Banners Are a Traditional Ad Format
Banners are advertisements in the traditional sense. End users expect a banner to advertise something to them; it’s not going to surprise them it’s an ad they’re looking at, so the banner creative can be tailored with this in mind. Banner ads have a very low potential to annoy, because they don’t come out of nowhere (pops can be perceived to do that) and aren’t mixed into content like native ads may be.
They aren’t an advertisement that relies on a title as part of it, like push ads and native ads. The ad creative image is exclusively what you have to work with. If you want to go flashy with it, you can use an animated GIF… but in some cases it’s advisable not to do that also. For example, serious finance offers will often perform better if they aren’t being advertised with an animated GIF.
Banners Come in Many Sizes
When you create a banner creative at PlugRush, you have quite a few different formats to choose from for your campaigns. Most advertisers will go with the most popular formats (300×250 and 300×100 for mobile; 300×250 and 728×90 for desktop), but the most effective media buyers we see killing it on banners don’t settle for this.
No. They cover all banner formats we have available with their campaigns in order to maximize potential reach. Get those banner clicks from less popular banner formats your competition is sleeping on and you’ll soon realize why the most successful media buyers put in the extra leg work to cover all bases.
Banner Creatives Should (Ideally) Prime the End User for Your Landing Page
If a banner is getting clicks from users at an acceptable CTR (let’s say 0.2% or better), it indicates an interest in what you’re advertising. If conversions do not occur at an acceptable rate, it’s time to either…
a) remove the banner from your campaign…
… or…
b) modify your landing page to better match up with the expectation the banner creates for the end user.
When you see poor performance happen in any part of your converson funnel, it’s important to look at the step that occurred before the disconnect was seen in your funnel. This is generally where the problem lies.
So, when the funnel breaks at the landing page level, you should analyze both the lander and the creative that sent to it. Make modifications you think will show an improvement and test those changes by using the power of split testing.
Concrete split-test examples:
- Use the same banner to send to different landing pages that you believe to be more in line with the expectation the banner creates before being clicked on. If you know the banner gets clicked, you know it’s interested to people… but this is only helpful if the click occurs because an expectation was created by the banner that will later be met by the landing page.
- Use different banners to send to the existing landing page. Try to make sure the new banner creatives match up better to generate an expectation that is met by the landing page.
Hope This Helps!
We hope these quick tips help you think about banner advertising in a more nuanced way. You should always capitalize on the unique benefits of individual ad formats. Please make sure to follow PlugRush’s Facebook page. It’s where we post about critical updates, promotional bonus codes, and helpful information like this blog post & our guides.
