Effective Budget-Friendly Banner Advertising
Part One - An Introduction

“Banners suck.”
“Banners are great.”

Bi-polar opinions on banners. Everybody has an opinion. That’s dandy. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s just agree that banners are often a fact of life for online businesses. Maybe you have one banner or maybe you have a thousand banners. How many you have does not really matter. What matters is using what you’ve got in the most effective way possible. You want people to see your banner, click on your banner, and then be taken to your clean, usable, attractive, informative (it better be) website and purchase your product or service.

Job done.
Easy.
Bob’s your uncle.

Why then, if it is so easy, do people come up with so many dumbass ways of trying to accomplish this simple process? Maybe they tend to forget that it is a PROCESS and every step is critical if you want it to work.

Here’s a few examples of how to bork the process:

1. Crappy Ad Location

In one scenario someone thinks banners are somehow magical creatures and will be all things to all people. They submit their banner to one of those nifty generic “banner exchange” programs, go get a gin and tonic, hunker down and wait for the internet pixies to spread their magic dust and the “traffic” to come rolling in.

They wait… and wait… and wait… They get old and die with a conversion rate of zero.

Life is too darn short to depend on everyone everywhere being interested in what you have to offer, so it might be a good idea to narrow the field a bit. While narrowing, stop by your own site and have a look at the great stuff being displayed there in exchange for signing up for this online parade of futility. Would you click on one? I doubt it. Dump the nifty generic banner exchange and don’t look back.

People with no interest whatsoever (or hope of interest) in your product won’t click on your banner. As a matter of fact, there is a good chance they will hate you for harshing the mellow of their browsing experience with your evil ad and hit you with the good old ad blocking plugin.

I use ad blockers all the time - and I design ads for a living.

With me, there is no second chance. If I’m browsing a website about Costa Rica and your ad for some weight loss product comes up - you are gone. Not just that ad. Your whole domain (or a least the domain that served the ad) is gone. Forever. No great loss to you though since I’m not overweight. I’m not a customer or even a potential customer. On the other hand, if I am browsing that same Costa Rica site and your banner for an eco-friendly lodge (with open bar on Tuesdays) comes up, you might have just got a new customer. Maybe. It depends on what the website that banner takes me to is like. Hell… you might even convince me to forget about Costa Rica and go to your lodge in Mongolia if you have open bar on more days than just Tuesdays.

I take back what I said about not depending on everyone everywhere being interested in what you have to offer if you are offering perpetual open bar.

Let’s get back on track now.

This might come as a shock to some (at least from what I see daily on the net) but it is just a really really good idea to place your banner on websites in which there is a good chance that people with some interest in your product will visit. Seems like that would go without saying, but anyone who spends any time on the net would probably agree that it looks like it has not been said enough yet. Banners in the wrong place piss people off. Of course sometimes even banners in the right place piss people off. Anyway, it is quite possible to get your brand out there without having the whole world hate you.

We will cover several routes down the path to getting your banner seen by the right people in another installment of this article.

2. Crappy Banner

“I want it to flash and blink so people will be interested in my site.”

Someone actually said that to me. It’s like saying “I want to be as annoying as I possibly can so I can find a nice girlfriend.” and really meaning it.

I guess there may be a sort of twisted logic to the idea. People do click on banners out of hate. Once. The onslaught of popups, popunders and other useless crap that followed was probably enough to stop that happening again… even if the “clicker” was just clicking out of some delusion that the scumbag responsible for the thing would be sitting on the other end - so that you could reach through the monitor, grab the little worm by the scruff of the neck and drag him outside and stake him to the nearest anthill.

If only…

Annoying is one thing. Some banners just suck for no other reason than that they suck.

Poorly made, unprofessional, bloated wastes of bandwidth. What a great first impression.

Get your banner made by a professional. A real professional. Just because some meathead got hold of gif animation software and figured out how to string a few frames together does not a professional make. Also, the single worst mistake a growing business can make is the “do it yourself” fantasy. Unless you are skilled in web design, you can’t make an effective website or banner. You can’t. Really. It might look okay to you - but that thing you just threw together is very often the first (and last) impression people get of your business. Do you really want that? Does it really reflect your business accurately? Not being able to design your website does not in any way indicate that you don’t know how to run your business. In fact, not trying to do something you can’t do well shows that you do know how to run your business. Thankfully, the “do it yourself” fiasco seems to have declined quite a bit since the 90s.

Three cheers for evolution. Maybe there is hope.

A good banner should be attractive, it should flow well, and it should tell in as few words/images as possible EXACTLY what you have to offer. For a small business with a tight budget it’s best to keep things real and avoid the dubious advice about how a banner should “be mysterious” and how it should “leave the viewer wanting more”. Corps with huge budgets can afford that kind of marketing and those kinds of campaigns in which banners/ads hold back info etc. are (usually) very well financed and well-planned. They are usually launched along with a much more far reaching ad campaign which includes other media. For a small business budget, it’s best to just tell your potential customers exactly what you’ve got.

On the topic of corps with huge ad campaigns, it would be a wise move for more of the ad agencies who handle those campaigns to modern up a bit and join the more innovative among them who realized early that they didn’t have the skills required to make effective web banners inhouse and and started outsourcing the creation of banners used in those campaigns to professional designers. It is disturbing to see so many really great media campaigns using web banners that look like an afterthought.

You can’t go wrong with clean when it comes to banner design, but there is no reason a banner can’t be wacky, trendy, whimsical, radical, dark, light, minimalist, over-the-top, controversial, old fashioned, silly, complex, simple, abstract, post impressionist, rococco or anything else as long as it is appropriate for your market, your product, and your business. Don’t make the mistake of misrepresenting your company or your product.

3. Crappy Website

We will look into crappy website syndrome in the next installment of this article…

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