What makes a good ad?

1. Use the most effective standard banner sizes

2. Place your banner ads correctly

3. People's eyes are naturally drawn to a subject within a frame.

Effective banner ads have a clearly defined frame with graphics extending to the edges of the frame. If your ad is white, it is common practice to put a 1-pixel grey border around the ad. As for file size, the smaller the better, under 150 kb, according to Google Adwords.

Your ad needs to load quickly on a page before viewers scroll down and miss it. JPG, PNG, GIF or HTML5 files will be your work products. Your designer will typically work in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to deliver the JPG, PNG or GIF files, or in Google Web Designer or Adobe Animate for the HTML5 files. Remember that Flash ads are pretty outdated at this point, so opt for these other image file formats.

This is a good post for making banner ads and 14 tips are useful for making new banner ads. Animation should be done in html5 nowadays. Google Web Designer or Adobe Animate. 

It's funny how many people invest only in good banner ad design, but don't maximise their budget for behavioural targeting and choosing the right times to show them. If you look at the examples above, the key takeaway is that photography is not always necessary, but probably should be part of banner ads if you are selling actual physical products. The logic here is to make the banners load as quickly as possible on the publisher's web pages so that people see them as soon as they visit those web pages. What exactly are banners and how do they work? We have a simplified version that you can use to explain them to anyone.

When designing a banner ad, I recommend that you look at all the features of your product or service and see what problems they could solve. Banner ads are advertising images embedded in web pages that showcase a product or brand and link to the advertiser's website. As it is an auction system, the cost of a banner campaign will vary depending on the display network you choose, the size of the ad, the competitiveness of your vertical, the popularity and nature of the placements on the website you win, etc. It is essential to convert your visitors into customers, especially those coming from your banner ads, so as not to waste a lot of advertising dollars, so in general, make sure your landing represents precisely what your banner ads are communicating.

But for premium ad placement, banner ads are the way to go and have cemented their importance in earning revenue for marketers. Recently, many advertisers have committed to animated banner ads, and will be saved to say, they have seen valuable results with their animated banner ad campaigns.

Cathleen Wheeley
Cathleen Wheeley

Friendly zombie aficionado. Certified social mediaholic. Evil travel ninja. Infuriatingly humble coffeeaholic. Pop culture expert.