What is a banner ad?
A banner ad is a visual advertisement for a product, service, or solution on a website. Designed to grab people’s attention, great banner ads engage a prospective customer into completing an action (for example, buying a product, getting in touch, or signing up) on the advertiser’s website. Banner ads, also known as display ads, are perfect for brand awareness, as it provides great visibility across a huge range of websites.
Banner ads come in various sizes and can appear prominently on the top or bottom of a webpage, within the content of the page, or quite often to the side of a webpage.
How do I get my banner ads shown to customers?
The process of showing your ads to customers is done through digital advertising platforms. Digital advertising platforms distribute ads, through groups of websites called display networks.
One of the most popular digital advertising platforms is Google Ads, as the Google Display Network is incredibly large and your ads will be shown on frequently visited websites, which can provide a vast advertising reach. Costs on this platform will be much higher than other networks, especially when trying to outbid your competitors for the best spots on the webpages – or to be seen on the page at all.
Other digital platforms include:
- Meta Ads – this includes the full Meta Audience Network, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger
- Microsoft Ads – MSN, Outlook, and the full Microsoft network
- Amazon Ads
- Direct Ad Placements – work with publishers directly (this is great for highly specific audience targeting, but difficult to expand and grow your audience)
All these platforms have different audience targeting options, ad sizes and formats, so it’s important to understand what’s right for your budget, campaign, and marketing needs.
Banner ad monitoring
It’s tempting to think that once you’ve created your banner adverts and placed them, your job is done. In fact, it’s vital to measure how your ads are performing over time so you can adjust and maximise your return on investment.
As your campaign is running, and once it’s come to an end, you will need to decide if it worked or not. You need to establish how you do this before your campaign finishes – ideally before it starts.
When looking at statistics there are three main things you need to look at:
- Impressions: how many times your banner was shown on a particular website.
- Clicks: how many times your banner was clicked on (the number of visitors who click on your banner ad and arrived at your website).
- Click through rate (CTR): the number of visitors who clicked on your banner ad and arrived at your website. (Clicks divided by Impressions, then expressed as a percentage (x100).)
Mobile banner ad monitoring
A mobile banner ad is a rectangular visual ad specifically designed to fit the smaller screen sizes and layouts of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Mobile banner ads are either static or animated and are usually displayed on the top or bottom of the page, sticking to the screen for the duration of the user session. While mobile ads can have a different call to action, for example “tap to call” rather than focusing on clicks, the aim of both desktop and mobile banner ads is the same, to capture attention and drive engagement.
What are you trying to achieve?
As with any form of advertising, you need to make sure you have clear goals. Are you trying to boost sales of a particular product or service, increase brand awareness, or expand into a particular market? Bear this in mind when you’re evaluating how successful your banner ads have been.
Simply measuring how many click-throughs you get isn’t necessarily a good indicator of how well your adverts are engaging your visitors. After all, if they come to your website and leave straight away, they haven’t become your customer – and you’ve had to pay for the privilege.
Instead, measure the action you want them to take – whether it’s signing up for a newsletter, calling your business or making a purchase. It’s also good to look at how long they spent on your website and how many pages they visited – the more time they spent browsing, the more likely they are to become customers in future.
Return on investment
You need to make sure that what you got out of the campaign is more than you put in. A lot of people will look at how much the campaign cost and how much money they made as a direct result of the campaign thinking that’s all that needs to be done, but it’s not.
- Cost per action: how much money you’ve spent on web promotion using banner adverts compared to how many people took the action you wanted as a result.
Remember your advertising goals
Measuring the success of your campaign depends on what your goal was at the beginning. At a very basic level, if you wanted more people to be aware of your brand, then you want to make sure you served lots of impressions. If your goal was to get people to sign up to your service, then you’re looking for clicks.
Lifetime value of a customer
You must look at the bigger picture. Let’s say you’re a florist and you spend £200 in August on a banner campaign, from this campaign you get 35,000 impressions and 35 clicks. Of those 35 clicks you get 5 sales at around £30 a sale, that’s £150 return on a £200 campaign. What’s the lifetime value of those 5 customers? If each customer comes back for Mother’s Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, their spouse’s birthday and always spends around £30 – that’s a lifetime value of £120 per year, per customer.
Indirect results
Let’s look now at the 34,965 people who didn’t click on your banner. Let’s say they saw it, went to another page and remembered their anniversary is coming up and they want to buy flowers. They’ve missed the opportunity to click on the banner, but your company name is in their head, they may search for you on Google or, if you’re local, pop in store! It might not be today or tomorrow, but someday…
Can an agency help?
Want to work with a marketing agency that has 50+ years of experience in helping local businesses to grow, and the 5-star reviews to prove it?
As part of our all-in-one digital marketing solutions, Yell’s experts boost the visibility of your business on social media to generate awareness, interest, and leads. Interested? Get in touch with us today to discuss how we can help you!
