Tips for Displaying and Positioning Affiliate Banners Effectively…continued
March 3, 2012
Affiliate advertising is when a publisher rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor drawn in by the affiliate’s own efforts at marketing. When it comes to affiliate advertising, banners can be more effective than you thought. They are easy to make and put up, but what make them effective are how the banner is designed, and more importantly, how it is positioned on an affiliate’s page. Here are our tips for displaying and positioning affiliate banners effectively for them to be a mutually beneficial resource.
Keep Your Banners Focused
If a potential customer clicks on a banner, it is very likely that he wants to know more about the product advertised on the banner. If the banner then takes them to a completely different or irrelevant page, the potential customer is lost more often than not. It is therefore very important that the banner continues to focus on a related landing page and takes the customer there and not to an arbitrary page. Also, the banner should be in keeping with the content of a page, because if the customer is on the page, it probably means that he is interested in the content. If you offer a banner that is totally different from the content of the page, no one will notice. But having a banner that is in sync with the content might make the customer want to click on the banner. A focused banner ad must have a smooth transition from follow through to click to buy:
In the above ad, the banner for the Tulsa Federal Credit Union blends seamlessly with the content of the page, which is about Tulsa residents, and clicking on the banner takes a visitor straight to the website of the Credit Union. A smooth blending is what makes this banner focused and effective.
Play Down the Animation
Animated banners are more effective than static banners in that the visitor to a webpage will be automatically drawn to movement on the page. But animated banners can only be effective when they are not overdone. Banners that obscure text, or move around wildly on the webpage are usually ineffective because visitors would want to leave the page as soon as possible. It is far more effective to have an animated banner that responds to an action performed by the visitor by will, or play subtly on another part of the webpage without interfering with content. The following example shows how annoying an ad can be when it randomly opens over the text taking over the page and making it temporarily impossible to view content. A visitor would probably close the ad without even looking at it, and if he cannot find the close button, he will probably leave the page. On the other hand, if this same ad was playing elsewhere on the webpage, the visitor might have looked at it, or even wanted to click on it to play it. It is very important to understand that the average web visitor finds ads annoying, and ads that deliberately distract are a complete no-no if you want them to work for you.
