Tips and tricks to create a striking banner

Tips and tricks to create a striking banner

Written by:
Carolina Marquez

Dec 23, 2014
FeaturedBanner

Creating a good effective banner that solves a problem is not an easy task.  Of course, you could think: hey, it's just about matching some words and a nice layout... But that is not the  case.  Like any other mode of communication, banners require a purpose, and a balance of design vs. function.

If you want your banner to be successful and to attract prospective customers, keep reading...

Before diving to design, the first thing you'll need to do is to ask yourself a few questions:

1. What do I want to achieve with this banner?
Gain an audience? Generate a conversion?

2. Which would be the indicator of success for this campaign?
A purchase? An increase in Click Through Rate (CTR)?

3. When visitors view the banner, what do I want them to do?
Click on it? Buy my product/service?

The first thing novice users think of is to have their company name and logo be on the banner, but if the most important goals is a high CTR (Click Through Rate or in laymen terms, the rate at which users click your banner defined as a percent), then we need to assign as much space as possible to our copy and images.

According to Google Adsense they are some sizes that work better than others: 336×280 Large Rectangle, 300×250 Medium Rectangle, 728×90 Leaderboard and 160×600 Wide Skyscraper are fairly good banner sizes for better exposure.

Banner1

You need to have a very good knowledge of who your audience is,  which will help you to define to where to place the banner.  Because no matter how well your banner is designed and engaging it might be,  Location, location, location, is extremely important for generating results.

Banners on your own site:

If you are placing a banner on your own website or blog,  you want to place it in key areas;   for example a large banner with key messaging on the home page above the fold (above the scrolling real estate) can have a great click through rate versus one that maybe much smaller or pushed down the page.

Screen Shot 2014-12-23 at 12.46.50 AM

Banners for Ads on third party sites:

If you are placing banners on third party sites (advertising for inbound traffic to your site) then you have to also consider other criteria.   The fact is when you advertise on other sites you also compete with other ads or you don't get the prime real estate you are looking for.    Therefore you need to make-up for those disadvantages by creating an Ad that gets the users attention and stands out, while at same time communicating effectively.

It's also important to create an entire campaign to achieve your goals versus depending on a single banner.  Additionally it would help to create more than one version of the same ad.  This way you can do variation testing (also called A/B tests and check which version has better performance).      Most ad providers including Google allow for variation testing to determine effectiveness of each ad.

You would be surprised how the same banner ad message with minor adjustments in design (ex. color or size of a call to action area) can affect the performance of a banner.

Case studies have also proven that people answer better to bright colors, like blue, green and yellow, and to some viewers color combinations such as yellow with navy blue.

But the more sophisticated audience might respond better to dark colors. White, red and black should mainly be used for contrast.

banner2

Content of a Banner

Copy is also an important factor for effective banners.   o from asking questions to using pretty clear call to actions (CTAs).  Avoid unclear and vague messages  such as "Click here NOW" or "you could loose 100's of dollars")  they come across as spam and would not do you any good.

These are examples of what you should avoid:

banner3

As you can see, they are  too busy and distracting..   The color combinations don't work, too busy and hard to ready the messaging and the purpose of the banners.

, they are not clean, they have way too much information and they are vague. You shouldn't do any of those things.

The font selection is also an important part. Audience won't look at your banner more than once, so it's important they get a clear view of what it is that you're offering: use clear and clean fonts like Futura or Helvetica.

Last thoughts

Remember; you're competing with 100's of messages every day that your visitors are inundated with.  So yours needs to stand out.   Be as clear and concise as possible!

With today's advances in design applications and online tools you don't need to be a professional designer to create banners for your website or business,

VIsme makes it as easy as it gets with its visual editor.  Check it out, apply all these tips and tricks and you'll have a winner banner in notime!

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    About the Author

    Caro is a internet marketer, blogger and a design enthusiast. She joined the Visme.co team on 2014, and she's been working with the tool ever since! She likes to share tips and tricks to make design and marketing easy and reachable for anyone!