Artefact1 - Online Advertising Research

Following the change of artefact 1 I have began doing some research surrounding online banner advertising. I found WebsiteTips a really helpful site that had a section on Banner Ads looking at banner design and marketing.

The marketing section hightlights online guidelines and standards and provides information on standard banner sizes.

It states that the most successful banner placement and according to Yahoo! with almost a 50% success rate was embedded content. This is surprsing as i would have thought this would stand out less as to the user and become less noticiable. The second highest is the leaderboard and according to Margaret Holland, a senior account manager at Yahoo! Publisher Network, finds that “from a click-through standpoint, most publishers get the best results when they place a 'leaderboard' above the fold between the top nav and their rich content.”

It also finds that banner colours are more successful if they blend in with the site rather than contrast. Again i was surprised at this as i would have thought this would make the advert go unnoticed however on further thought i realised this may be more successful as it is less intrusive. It allows the advert to feel part of the site and not as something completely different helping the user to feel it is trusted and will link to the site not some irrelevant product.

The deisgn section highlights 13 infaillable banner design tips:

1. Nothing beats a good punch line
2. Good Copy - Short and simple
3. Relevant content not xxx!
4. Something that will never die - intice the user using "NEW" and "FREE"
5. Include logo and url
6. Cliches work!
7. Banner file size - keep it under 10kb and keep loading times down!
8. Banner animations - typically a user spends less then 10sec viewing the banner so the annimation should be tis length or less.
9. To animate or not? anitmated banners = 30% higher click through then static. However optimistaion is key in animation.
10. Using flash - flash = higher click through then animated gifs as smoother.
11. Blue underlined text - users recognise as links
12. Tricking the user - html elements as images encourages movement to site.
13. Several banners for one campaign - allows you to reach a larger audience preference.