Banner Ads - The Essential Facts

In the last five years I have had the unusual experience of running an advertising operations department in a premium publisher network, whilst also managing my own media buys for consumer panels.

Below are some key lessons I learned that may challenge your assumptions about how you are spending or planning to spend your acquisition budget.

These are lessons learned from watching or managing thousands of campaigns running on some of the worlds best known web publishing properties.

You need a frequency cap.
Whatever you do – get your banner ads frequency capped. Frequency caps are a method of capping the number of times a user sees an ad within a period of time. As a general rule, the likelihood that a user will respond after 7 views of an ad takes a swift nose-dive. So to start out cap your spend to 7 views per user per day or week if it is a site that sees a high rate of return. Frequency caps not only reduce the wastage of your spend but they will increase the unique audience that your ads will get in front of. The ad server will try to serve the same number of ads but will seek new viewers to show them to.

Page Duration
The amount of time people spent on a page is critical to the potential response of your campaign. Transactional portals like auction and ticketing sites often struggle to gain competitive response rates.

These low responses are thought to be a combination of the low average page duration (time a user spends on a page before clicking away or refreshing) and the fact that the end user is focusing on the purchase or auction process. With the exception of “thank you” or receipt pages I typically avoid transactional sites.

Thank You Pages
A highly effective and often overlooked media opportunity is the receipt or “thank you” page at the end of the purchase process. This page sits at the point where the user has not only completed their journey but is (presumably) satisfied and looking for the next thing to do. Here is the real kicker – they often have their credit card in their hand. I often see responses on “thank you” pages that are 10-100 times that of other pages!

Content Sites
Content sites tend to respond considerably better as the average page duration tends to be higher. That means your ad sits on the page longer and the end user is exposed to it longer. It is still just one impression. If the page duration is very high – say in the minutes, you may get by with a frequency cap of 1 per user.


Sizes
Ad sizes matter. The 468x60 that was ubiquitous in the early days of the web is virtually invisible to the human eye now. I would assert that the 728x90 is rapidly following suit. The 300x250 or “island” banner works best when floating in a sea of text and the 700x300 on a logout or “thank you” page is the king. Again, apply your frequency caps in all cases.

Text
Text rocks! Text ads more often than not outperform banner or visual creative’s. Users have trained themselves to seek text information on a page. A “content clip” or “contextual” advertisement that relates to the content on the page can be very effective. Text ads more often than not outperform visual ads.

Optimization
Your network or publisher will optimize your campaign just as soon as hell freezes over. You need to dictate when and how a campaign is optimized. It is typical for a network or publisher to blow your entire budget for a month with no frequency cap or optimization before giving you a report and a lame suggestion for optimization. I know how my campaigns are going to perform after 1000 impressions. Media buying is best suited to control freaks.

Rich Media
Flash or Rich Media ads rarely outperform animated gif ads. Your creative agency doesn’t want you to know that. However rich media is essential if you want to run a movie or OTP (Over The Page) creative.

Just trust me on this one…
The best background color for a white background site is black. Your creative agency really doesn’t want you to know that – they usually think black backgrounds are perverse. The reality is that a solid black ad on a white page sucks your eye straight to it, giving your message undivided attention.