A web banner or a banner ad is a form of online advertising embedded into a web page. It is mainly designed to attract traffic to the website of the advertiser. Banners can help an online store to raise sales, create a brand image and awareness, or inform about company news and offers. Variety of application areas dictates the multiple forms of eCommerce banners. It can be a graphic, a graphic with text, a full-width banner, pop-up, video banner, or a float (rich-media).
Planting a banner into an eCommerce store to promote your brand, it is worth remembering about the right time: celebrations, promotions & sales, change of business information, seasonal offers; and place: home, category, product, content, and checkout pages, in emails, customer account or in the vendor’s mini-stores. Think about your customer: what, where and when he or she needs to see your banner? Answering these issues, you will learn the key elements to build an effective banner ad campaign.
For more inspiration, you can refer to best practices. Let’s take the United States as an example. They are the leaders in getting the revenue from banner ads. The Figure below proves the same.
Source: statista.com
The United States forecast says that the mobile banner ad revenue is going to grow from 11.47 billion USD in 2017 to 20.12 billion in 2023.
As the diagram shows, banners can bring money to an advertiser. But what makes a banner so worth spending money on designing it?
Let’s take a look at some American companies banner designs to reveal their secret sauce!
Airbnb
Airbnb’s goal was to open the world to travel. In doing so, they targeted their audiences geographically creating high-quality pictures. They became an international brand, listing grew from 1 to 80,000 and today everybody is talking about their success.
Microsoft
Ads are at their best when they are targeted to a specific niche. Thus, it won’t seem annoying for a wide audience but will resonate with your targeted customers. Take, for example, this banner ad campaign from Microsoft. It’s simple, comprehensible and targeted to a specific niche. It means you have to be at least a junior programmer to understand their message. This is how a message banner acts: it doesn’t resonate with everybody but only with the individuals who understand the message and may find it of interest to them.
Time Magazine
Publishers also use banner ads to get the user on their website and generate email leads. TIME Magazine used a set of nine banner ads that were displayed on the time.com site to channel potential subscribers to a new funnel. These banner ads were created in different sizes but they all keep the Time brand identity. They used a conversion funnel to also be accessible via touch screen tablet and mobile devices, using a responsive design methodology to provide a UI that was designed for each device form. And now, the CTR of the banner in their file set, displayed on time.com went from 0,01$ to 0.08% all traffic.
Clarisonic
Testimonials are not just another great source of content marketing. They also help build trust with your customers by sharing some of your best success stories. So, if you have them, why not use some for your banners? You can tell a simple story through a testimonial short message and still, show your creativity in all the other elements of the online store banners like Clarisonic did.
Adobe
There is no other better testimonial than the product itself. While sometimes, especially when you sell software, you cannot show the product itself on a single banner, you can use your creativity to show your customers what your products are good for. This is where Adobe’s banners are at their best. They are not just beautiful in design but also effective, because they advertise the outcome, not just the means.
Closing
As you can see, the banner design can bring profit when used properly and wisely. You can take these tips to implement them in-house for your online store or rely on our expertise in web-banners designed specifically for Multi-Vendor and CS-Cart shops. We gathered the world best experience multiplied by our web-design competency to offer you a service for creating professional and eye-catching eCommerce banners. While designing a responsive banner optimized for any device, we consider all the actual trends such as animation, video, countdown and more, but also implement our market knowledge to propose the best way for banner advertising.