If you are thinking about using display and digital banner ads as a part of a wider marketing strategy, you’ve come to the right place.
Brands have to fight tooth and nail to capture every piece of market share they can. The competition never rests and the barrier to entry has never been lower for SMEs to perform effectively. Advanced artificial intelligence and automation platforms open up a host of marketing tactics previously available only to large-scale businesses.
Let’s dive into the world of visual ads and explore how to get the most from them.
What are Display and Digital Banners Ads?
Display and digital banner ads are forms of digital advertising, a catch-all term that relates to any form of paid ad that uses primarily visual assets to reach potential customers. As with all ads, the fundamental goal is to drive engagement and, ultimately, generate conversions.
Display ads have a proven track record of driving high-performance campaigns. When managed smartly they can become a key part of your wider strategy and bring you closer to your audience. Interestingly, the approach you need to take when handling display can differ greatly depending on your target platform, and we’ll discuss this where applicable.
The terms “display ads” and “digital banner ads” are often used interchangeably. In the early days of digital advertising, many display ads were digital banners displayed at the top of a website. Today, these are still common forms of marketing and advertising, but there are other ways of getting more creative with your display ads.
Let’s look at the key differences in more detail.
Display Ads
Display ads are the most prolific types of visual advertising used across the internet. They can be various sizes and orientations, and be shown across different platforms as website, social media, or mobile ads. They also encompass a broad range of visual formats, including pop-ups, video ads, and interactive rich media (more on this below).
Display ads are incredibly flexible and are just as ideal for advertising a new product launch or a service such as advertising CRM call center services for example.
Banner ads are a type of display advertising, but here are a few others to consider:
Screenshot sourced from nationalgeographic.com for native ads
- Native ads: Designed to blend into the existing content and design of the page or platform they’re placed on, they will be marked as paid or sponsored
- Retargeting ads: Shown to people who have already interacted with your brand online in the hopes of re-engaging them
- Rich media ads: Incorporate dynamic multimedia content such as video, audio, and animations or interactive features such as clickable elements and forms
- Expandable ads: Viewers can expand the original display ad into a bigger format
- Pop-up ads: Small windows that appear when a visitor triggers a particular action. These are often used for sign-up services and offers.
- Responsive ads: Automatically adjusts the size, appearance, and format of text and visuals to fit the space. With traditional display ads, advertisers have to create and upload different ad sizes based on given dimensions. Responsive ads, however, are adjusted by the platform based on historical ad performance.
Digital Banner Ads
Banner ads are a basic subset of display ads that are usually placed at the top or side of web pages. These creative ads are typically rectangular and static but they can also contain simple animations – this is known as dynamic ads.
Screenshot sourced from IMDB.com
You can use them on-page in different ways – to support large text taglines, flash deals, and other messaging that you want visitors to see consistently.
Given the smaller vertical footprint of banner ads, they are particularly useful on desktop pages for conveying important information quickly and effectively. It’s easy and effective to craft banners with tagline offers, a virtual telephone number or email contact, and eye-catching imagery all in one package.
For that reason, many brands use digital banners to grab people’s attention and simply build brand awareness or generate clicks to drive traffic to their website or specific landing pages.
4 Parts of a Display Ad
Whether you’re running retargeting ads or pop-ups, there are a few different components that every type of ad should include.
- Title: Every ad needs an attention-grabbing headline. Often, this is your core offer or tagline, such as “Shine like a Pro” in the above example.
- Copy: Your ad description should give the viewer a bit more detail but still be snappy, engaging, and persuasive.
- Visual: This could be a static image or rich media such as a video or animation. Regardless, it should speak to your target audience and be relevant to your message.
- Call to Action: CTAs are central to marketing and advertising, so your display ads must have one if you want to convert viewers. The CTA should be clear to understand and easy to follow with simple language that drives viewers to take action, such as ‘Shop Now’, ‘Learn More’, or ‘Sign Up’.
Image sourced from Amazon Ads
What Makes an Effective Display Ad?
Online consumers are busy and have a limited attention span. They’ll quickly scroll past your ad if you don’t grab their attention immediately. Here are a few ways to stop them in their tracks.
Clear and Compelling Copy
From the headline to the description and even those two or three words you use in the CTA, ad copy must be clear, concise, and compelling.
Use those few seconds you have to grab someone’s attention by adding a strong headline that quickly gets your message across. Then, use the description to highlight the benefits of your offer and what your target audience gains.
Here are a few other useful tips:
- Focus on the benefit: Besides being clear, your headline and copy need to emphasize the benefit to users. So rather than simply stating a feature, demonstrate how it solves a problem or makes their life easier. For example, if you’re promoting HubSpot VoIP integrations to businesses, you might focus on how that helps those businesses deliver an exceptional customer experience.
- Personalize the message: Personalization is one of the leading best practices for programmatic creatives and, indeed, modern marketing in general. When it comes to display ads, use dynamic content to personalize them based on the viewer’s behavior, location, or preferences.
- Avoid jargon: This is particularly important if you’re promoting technical products and services to audiences with limited technical knowledge. Looking at our previous VoIP example, it’s important to know your audience and whether they understand what VoIP is.
Simple Design
Much like the language you use, your design should be focused. It’s tempting to want to get across as much information as you can to convince ad viewers, but this can have the opposite effect and end up confusing or overwhelming them.
Avoid overcrowding the ad with too much text, unnecessary graphics, multiple images, and multiple CTAs. Instead, embrace white space, using it to draw the viewer’s eyes to the most important elements.
Contrasting colors can also help text stand out from the background, but make sure your color palette and other design elements align with your brand style.
Screenshot sourced from SI.com
High Quality Visuals
Whether you use images or videos, make sure they are high quality and eye-catching. Grainy, out-of-focus visuals make your brand look unprofessional and sloppy, which doesn’t create a great perception in the eyes of the viewer.
How Can I Make My Display Ads Better?
To ensure you get the most out of your display ad strategy, here are some tips to optimize your approach to display advertising and reduce the chance of a dud campaign.
Define Your Brand Image Before You Create Materials
Part of the power of display ads is the ability to take your brand’s message off-site to other platforms. This outreach cannot be understated; it helps brands of all sizes get more visibility and engage with their intended customers.
Before embarking on this strategy, however, you need to have a consistent brand image. This is more than just a color profile marketing materials need to adhere to; it’s your brand’s ethos, values, and identity.
The visual and text you put in your display ads must be consistent for users who click through to your site. This makes them feel safe and confident with your brand and ensures you are communicating the right message and is boosting the impact of ads.
If you work with a third-party agency for your advertising, outline all of this before you begin.
Refine Your Targeting
For your ads to be effective, you need to make sure you’re talking to the right people and creating targeted messaging rather than messaging for the masses.
Start by segmenting your audience into different groups – for example, demographics, interests, behaviors, and buying stage.
Use retargeting ads to re-engage audiences who are already aware of your brand and have previously interacted with you. Define what that interaction means – perhaps they’ve visited your website before or taken a specific action on your website.
Retargeting campaigns tend to have higher conversion rates – in fact, according to RTB House research, they could increase your conversion rates by nearly 110% after 6 months. So showing this segment of audiences a display ad could have great results.
If you have plenty of customer data at your disposal, it’s also worth targeting lookalike audiences. Use the data to find people similar to your existing customers and target them with campaigns that meet their needs and interests.
Leverage A/B Testing to Understand Your Audience
Any optimized ad strategy will need to make iterative changes to the creation and delivery of content. A/B testing, also known as split-testing, is one of these methods.
You serve two similar but unique versions of an ad to customers, measure the engagement metrics to determine which is superior, and move forward with the stronger content.
Screenshot sourced from tuffgrowth.com
Repeat this process until you have a high-performing ad that is hitting your goals for the campaign. You can use Nexd’s Creative Optimization tool to do the work for you, automatically.
You can A/B test several things, including:
- Elements: Play around with images, headlines, CTAs, and designs. Make small tweaks like the color or wording of your CTA button as well as bigger changes like a video versus a static image.
- Formats: Analyze different ad formats like carousel ads, responsive ads, and animated banners to see what your target audience responds best to.
- Platforms: Compare ad performance on different platforms, for example mobile vs desktop to make sure your campaigns are optimized for where your audience is most active.
How to Make Rich Media Display Ads: Tools & Skills
Rich media can be incredibly powerful for capturing people’s attention as they scroll through an app or website. But they also need more attention to design, interactivity, and optimization to make them as engaging and effective as possible.
Here are some essential tools and skills to help you not only make but make the most of rich media display ads.
Coding Skills
Rich media ads use coding, so this is an essential skill. Basic coding skills allow you to customize ad units, include interactive elements, or troubleshoot.
Expanding your knowledge of HTML5 is a great starting point as it’s widely supported across platforms and devices. Knowledge of Javascript and CSS are also useful for designing visual aspects, styling ads for responsive behavior, and adding interactive elements like expandable banners.
That said, coding can be complicated. So if you don’t have the time or money to invest in HTML5 skills or services, no-code tools are a much easier option.
Nexd’s no-code tool is lighter, more intuitive, and better performing than the HTML5 codes you could make in platforms like Celtra. As a self-service option, it gives you all the capabilities without any of the complex, costly coding so you can design rich media ads quickly and easily.
Graphic & Responsive Design
As a marketer or advertiser, you may already understand graphic design basics, but rich media require more in-depth knowledge of design principles. That includes layout as well as composition, color theory, typography, and branding.
It’s helpful to be proficient in a few tools, particularly for creating static elements such as backgrounds, CTA buttons, and logos:
- Nexd: An all-round creative management platform. Nexd is particularly useful for designing animations, interactive ads, and responsive designs. The platform is simple to use, meaning you can use one set of assets to create multiple responsive ads for desktop and mobile in minutes.
Screenshot sourced from Nexd.com
- Adobe Photoshop and IIllustrator: Both are great for working with images, the key difference being the type of file you’re working on. Illustrator is ideal for creating vector images and graphics, which is useful for scaling designs up or down without compromising quality. Photoshop, on the other hand, is best suited for photo editing. Use it to adjust photo composition, create cutouts, layer images together, or build collages.
- Figma: Ideal for creating prototypes and visual elements. It’s also great for collaborating in real-time. While it doesn’t handle full HTML5 creation like Google Web Designer does, it’s still a good option for designing and collaborating on layouts and visuals.
- Canva: Best for small businesses or teams with limited design resources. It’s simple and user-friendly, and features plenty of customizable layouts. The free version is quite limited but the Pro plan gives you access to animation features and greater editing capabilities like background removers.
Video Editing & Production
If you want to explore videos in your rich media ads, having video production skills is an obvious benefit. At a minimum, you should be able to shoot, edit, and produce short videos that grab someone’s attention online.
Get to grips with Premiere Pro, another product in the Adobe Suite that will give your video-based ads a professional, polished look. It’s a full video editing suite with multi-track editing, color grading, transitions, and motion graphics.
Other tools to consider include Final Cut Pro, Animaker, Powtoon, Lightworks. Shotcut is great for Linux users, while OpenShot and Blender are great free tools if your budget is limited.
Animation and Motion Graphics
Animations add a more engaging element to your ads. To create stand-out ones that are smooth and visually appealing, you need to understand keyframes, transitions, and timing.
Useful tools include Nexd, Adobe Animate, and After Effects, while you can also create simple animations in Canva.
Image sourced from Canva.com
User Experience (UX) Design
The user experience is crucial to rich media design. Poor UX causes frustration and low engagement. On the other hand, a strong UX ensures your ads aren’t only engaging but easy to interact with.
You need to understand user flow and behavior so you can design ads accordingly. Ads should also be designed for responsiveness, meaning they’re intuitive and functional.
This is applicable regardless of the device they’re viewed on. But it’s particularly important that they’re optimized for mobile devices, especially if you’re running mobile interstitial ads.
Part of UX also incorporates CTA placement as this can significantly impact whether viewers take the action you want them to. CTAs should be visible and clickable to encourage conversions.
It’s also worth familiarizing yourself with an API example or two, particularly if you’re running a lot of ads on your account.
An API, or application programming interface, is a way for software applications to ‘speak’ with each other. Platforms like Google and Amazon Ads have their own APIs, designed to help you manage your ad account based on inventory, create custom reports to gauge campaign performance, and manage bidding.
Responsive Display Ads Best Practices
If you go down the route of creating responsive ads, here are a few ways to ensure they’re most likely to drive conversions.
Make Use of Google’s Machine Learning
Google’s algorithm exists to optimize your ads. It tests different iterations of your ads by showing different combinations of your headlines, images, descriptions, and logos.
The more options you provide the algorithm, the more flexibility Google has to create a high-performing ad that will improve your conversions and ROI.
Try not to manually control the layout. Responsive ads are designed to adapt, so trust Google’s machine learning to show the best combinations to your target audience.
Keep Ad Size in Mind
Many platforms have particular requirements when it comes to ad or image sizes. Look at their guidelines and adapt your designs to match.
Chances are you’ll have to design multiple ad sizes, but this is the best option. You need to make sure your ads can fit various placements by supporting multiple sizes.
Keep in mind that Google adjusts the ad size, but you still need to have appropriate landscape or square images so the algorithm can make better adjustments.
Use No-Code Tools for Rich Media
While responsive ads work automatically across all formats, custom HTML5 ads allow for unique and highly engaging creatives. But HTML5 is complicated and ads designed with this code can take longer to load.
Make the most of no-code tools to save yourself time and resources. Choose a platform like Nexd that’s easy to use and features no-code layouts. This allows you and your team to create engaging responsive ads for more complex interactions, such as expandable content or animations, with little effort.
Plus, the ads will load much more quickly, increasing the chances of your target audience seeing and engaging with them.
Display Ad Design and Visuals: Dos and Don’ts
Time for a quick recap. If nothing else, follow this checklist of dos and don’ts to ensure your display and digital banner ads are effective.
- DO: Add your logo
- DO: Use easy-to-read fonts
- DO: Test multiple sizes and formats
- DO: Test animated banners vs. static banners
- DO: Align display ads with your landing page
- DON’T: Clutter up your design
- DON’T: Underestimate the power of an eye-catching image
- DON’T Be afraid to get creative
- DON’T: Forget a compelling call to action
The Next Steps
Display and banner ads offer unique advertising opportunities for businesses. All you need is a bit of creativity and the help of the right creative management platform.
If you want to stand out online, display ads are an effective way of capturing your target audience’s attention and communicating your message in an easy-to-digest package. Best of all, they can easily be integrated into websites and apps to drive brand awareness and sales.