The ulitmate banner ad

[andythomas]

Hi all

Just wondering what everyones experience was with banner ads and their success. Has anyone changed one particular thing and found it made all the difference?

I work at a youth social website with thousands of members and am looking to crack the American market and need to know all the positives+negatives/ pros+cons/ dos+donts to create the ultimate, in your face and successful banner ads.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[MarkWolk]

AFAIK the most successful ads these days are pure text ads. Banners are often made to look like pure text. Anything that looks like advertising with images is less effective.

[FourDegreez]

Non-standard shapes, especially banners with transparency in places, i.e. rounded corners, someone's head appearing to stick out beyond the banner border, etc. I've had great success with these. I wish affiliate programs would create more non-standard banners. Maybe we'll see better banners soon since MSIE 7 supports partial transparency.

[edited by: eljefe3 at 3:58 am (utc) on Nov. 3, 2005]

[ccam96]

banners are not very effective for pure ROI reasons. If you're mainly out for image branding , then it may be a very good option.

I have very poor CTR's with images compared to text surrounded by very good and informative content that answers the specific question being asked by your visitor. I completely ignore image advertising from my merchants. It's a waste of time in my opinion.

The best steps to follow are..

1, What's your target audience?
2. What question do they want answered?
3. Target those visitors to your targeted page that answers the question.
4. insert your affiliate link within the answer

This formula will work every time.

[andythomas]

Thanks for all your help guys much appreciated.