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The first and foremost thing that is
important to achieve through banner design
is its ability to generate ACTION. When a visitor sees your
banner on a site, she must be compelled to click on to it.
This can be achieved through effective use of animation,
good, compelling copy, and its graphic design.
While using animation, however, one must be careful not
to over-do it. Banners with too much animation can become
distracting. An endlessly looping animation can be quite
annoying and its best to have it settle down after 3-4 loops.
Make sure your message is displayed on the last frame.
It must also be ensured that banners are quick to
download. Its not just annoying for visitors to
see something take ages to download but it can actually
fail to achieve any results for you if the visitor is able
to find relevant information and leave the page before your
banner has even begun to show up on her screen.
As with any design, use an optimum number of colors. Make
your ads pleasing to look at.
Pay attention to your copy. Make sure your messages are
carefully worded. Don't make your ads verbose. Short, crisp
messages can achieve high CTRs for you. Try and address
concerns, offer benefits.
Some banner ads with high click through rates (CTRs)
have words like - 'Click now', 'Get it here'. Another design
idea that is known to achieve a high number of clicks from
visitors, though inadvertantly, is the use of alert boxes
or some similar windows application status boxes. An example
could be an anti-virus company using a windows alert box
saying: Virus like activity detected on this computer. Do
you want to detect and remove virus? Yes No. A lot of visitors
could mistake this banner for an alert message from their
system and click on it.
Change your banners frequently as research has shown that
CTRs for a banner ad drops significantly after a few weeks.
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