Effective Creatives Part 3– Image Creatives

Image creatives are often known as banner ads. These were very popular in the early days of online marketing, but at some point began to be slightly less effective. With recent innovations in design and technological advances, image creatives are once again becoming a very effective tool in an affiliate marketer’s toolbox. Indeed, banner ads are everywhere on the Internet and it’s likely that anyone surfing the Net on a given day will come across several.

Banner ads come in all sizes and flavors. From small square ads to rectangular banners that take up almost the entire length of a page and everything in between. There are no real rules or specifications as to what makes a successful image creative, but what is clear is that with so many being shown to surfers on a daily basis, one must find a way to stand out from the others.

The point of an image creative is simple: it is designed to entice someone to click on it, taking them to a landing page that should eventually lead to a sale. Why will a person click on a banner ad? Simplicity reigns here again. They will click because they have been offered a good or service that they are interested in obtaining. So how does one go about creating an ad that does this?

You must get their attention.

You ads must stand out on a page. As already mentioned, with so many banner ads out there, standing out in the crowd can sometimes be difficult, but there are a couple of ways to grab the attention of your potential customers. The answers aren’t all that much different than create great print ads, but with the Internet, there are more possibilities.

That said, an ad should not be distracting, nor should it intrude upon the page that it is on.

Images should have something to do with the product you’re promoting. A great way to get those images to stand out is by using animation. Animate, however, with caution. Even though big, blinking ads that scream at you will command attention, these are often ignored. Also, people often associate this type of ad with scam sites, so keep your animations engaging, but simple.

When using images, use ones that convey the message you want to send to potential customers. If the product is a vacation, an image of a couple relaxing on a beach sends a positive message to the viewer that indicates what they’re going to be getting out of this product or service. Show them the benefits. And let your images be of top quality. The quality of the ad will be associated with the product you are marketing, so be sure to adjust accordingly.

In addition, these banners must load quickly. Slow loading banner ads may miss their chance to reach the audience you are trying to attract. Work with designers who know how to make ads that will appear on the page quickly, and in the time necessary to reach your audience. This is important as image quality is inversely proportional to load times, so finding a good image optimization technique will help you to find the middle ground between those two issues.

And once you’ve got their attention, image creatives must tie in what we learned about yesterday: the text that accompanies the image must be clear and concise, with a strong call to action.

Again, and we can never stress this enough, the way to find out which image creatives are going to work the best is by testing, testing and retesting. Keep abreast of the statistics of how your creatives are performing, and rotate your banners to test several at once. Never limit yourself to just one creative.

Affiliates and merchants must work together to create effective ads. The most important part of this equation is to understand the efficacy of these ads, and it’s through tracking the results that this information will be gleaned. In the next part of our series, we’ll look at how to use Share Results’ affiliate marketing software to track your ad campaigns, be they text or image creatives. Come back next week for more!

Tagged as: banner creative, creative, PPC creative, text creative