How long should an animated web banner be?

Inline rectangle - 300 x 250 pixels. Large rectangle - 336 x 280 pixels. Large moving banner - 320 x 100 pixels. The banner can be looped, but the animation must stop after 30 seconds.

No display advertising campaign is complete without the Medium Rectangle. This standard banner holds 40 percent of the global inventory and is by far the most important inventory in your advertising arsenal. With the advent of HTML5, which offers native cross-browser support, faster loading speeds and smoother animations, there was no need for Flash banners. It's funny that many people only invest in good banner design, but don't maximise their budget for behavioural targeting and choosing the right times to display them.

Animated banners have the innate ability to be unique and stand out, which means that users will engage with your banner for longer. Animated banners are more complex and more expensive to produce, but they tend to perform better than static images. Due to the unique size and shape of the medium rectangular ad and its widespread use, Google has issued specific guidelines for this type of banner. That said, creating multiple variations of your banner in all available sizes can be time consuming.

When choosing your animated ads, it's important to remember that GIFs are slowly disappearing and the more impressive end result of HTML5 banners makes them the better choice. Great blog post, I am currently designing some banner ads and these examples you have shared are simple, to the point, and consistent will help to complete my work. Sometimes called Standing Banner, this is the more common of the two Skyscraper banners with 12 the overall inventory. The standard IAB ad package also includes banners, but that size is not as popular with publishers.

The 728×90 Leaderboard is part of the IAB standard banner sizes and works well on the Google Display Network. We recommend focusing on the standard and most effective banner sizes available (the top 10 performing banner sizes account for 90 percent of the impressions on the Google Ad Network). An important part of this is the progression of banner ads, and the role they play in advertising since their inception in 1994.

Cathleen Wheeley
Cathleen Wheeley

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