How to Design Effective Advertisements (part I)

March 28, 2012      Banner Design, Blog

Advertising is not something you learn over coffee in an afternoon. People spend their whole lives trying to make advertisement displays that are effective and functional, and yet, miss the very basic premises for making adverts that do all that and more. In this session we are going to tell you about those basic premises or outlines that make an ideal ad to showcase your business. While we keep to our end of the bargain, you take a step ahead too, and find yourself a platform where you can test our tips and your ads before they go live.

1. Size Matters: Look through multiple reports and they will all give you different results for the same question: What is the most effective size for your online ad? While reports from Dynamic Logic will tell you that the 234 x 60 half banner ads and the 180 x 150 small rectangle ads are more effective than leaderbaoards and large rectangles (1), Phoebe Ho of Google’s Ad-sense Optimization team will tell you that the best performing ad size is the 336 x 280 large rectangle, followed by the 300 x 250 medium rectangle and the 160 x 600 wide skyscraper (2). A research from Marketing Sherpa will tell you that the highest CTRs were achieved by the 300 x 250 and the 728 x 90 ad sizes (3). So where do you take your inspiration from? Provided you know where to place your ad on the website, you could really experiment with different ad sizes till you hit one that suits your business most. Things to keep in mind would be the ad content and the loading time of the ad. Remember most websites will not take image sizes above 50 kb because they slow down the loading time.
2. Well-rounded Content and Call to Action: Honestly, no one will click on your ad because you tell them to. Viewers are more demanding than you give them credit for. They will not do what you tell them to do unless you can convince them to do it. This means that an overbearing call to action is not going to get you anywhere unless there is content on the ad that lures them into clicking on it. When you are making your ad, remember this and create a well-rounded approach rather than just hawking your product and trying to goad viewers to become customers. Sure you have limited space for flair in your content, but brevity does not mean you compromise on quality. As David Belasco rightly said, “If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.” Keep it brief, keep it interesting, and viewers will automatically click on the call to action without your pushing them to.

To be continued to..