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REDDOG SPECIALISES IN HELPING SMALL BUSINESSES IMPROVE CASH FLOW AND INCREASE PROFITABILITY. WE HAVE OVER 20 YEARS EXPERIENCE IN MARKETING & MANAGEMENT
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REDDOG ARE LEADERS IN E-COMMERCE MARKETING & DISTRUBUTION
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Banner ads brought with them a new era in efficient and easy way to use web based online marketing.
Companies suddenly had a new alternative that was efficient enough to take television advertising head on and yet was quite affordable. Because of the cheap and effective nature of banner advertising, it was an instant hit. From websites to email footers, banner ads were seen everywhere.
With banner ads and online advertising the business world has received a bigger and better promotion platform than ever before.
To develop stylish banner ads that effectively promote your business is a science in itself.
To gain a few valuable advertising techniques and ideas check out the tips mentioned below for winning banner design ideas.
* ‘Click Here‘ – The usage of words like ‘Click here’, ‘Enter’ and ‘Ok’ is a really important element of designing a banner ad. The usage of these action type words seems mundane and nothing new but it has been proven time and time again through research that these call to action worlds act like a subconscious stimuli and increase the chances of a banner to be clicked.
* Animate! – For a banner, there is nothing like an animation to catch the viewers attention.its An animated banner demands attention and creates interest. Animated banners are also useful as they complement the design of a website. Consider your audience and what you are offering and consider how the animation ads to your message.
Don’t over do It!Care should be taken, to keep the banner animation to a level that doesn’t allow it to take over the message trying to be delivered. The content will be what you want remembered not how many twirls the text did, unless of course the twirls relate to your product or service.
Whilst there are no hard and fast rules about how much animation should be on a banner keep in mind the layout of your website and ultimately what looks good and still remains small in size for website loading.
Remember, A lot of animation means a lot of images, sounds or other multimedia objects; all this makes a banner bulkier in size and thus increases the time taken by the banner to load on a computer.
* Size – For a banner, many say size does matter.
Whilst a major priority should be to make banners which are able to load quickly and effectively. Ideally,a banner is an Advertisement and Ads are meant to SELL! –
Whether it be a product, a service, an idea or a concept ask yourself, What do I want The Person To Do After Seeing The Banner?followed by the question-
Why Will People Do It?
* Headlines
Forget sizes and animation for a second as The HEADLINE in a banner is one of the most important things that not only attract the visitors. it needs to spark an emotion or a response from the viewer.
A good looking banner alone is nothing more than Creative Design and is not enough to attract viewers who may need or want your product or service.
Most users do not have or give enough time to admire the beauty or creative genius of a banner and certainly do not care to read through drawn out content and irrelevant information.
A Well Planned BannerHeading helps the users to know the content of a banner in a single look. If you are giving a service or product that is free, one of the best words to use as a heading in your banner is the word ‘FREE’.
People love a bargain and therefore The word ‘FREE’, when partnered with a real value type of offer , almost immediately guarantees exponential click through rates.
* Blue – The inclusion of blue underlined texts and blue borders have spelled wonders for banners.
We have been programmed that a blue underlined text or a blue border is immediately identified as a hyperlink and thus leaves no doubt in the mind of a user that the banner will genuinely take them to a legitimate safe website.
If your product or service is new and you are not a renowned website, the Inclusion of the website name on the banner has shown to provide a level of comfort in people concerned about spamming and things like key logging etc.
* Change – If you have not changed your banner ads for a long time, it’s like a two month old newspaper – Old News!
By using analytics you can make small changes that make a large difference whilst the campaign is in progress.
Things to consider are like “Is one size getting more clicks than another?”
or ” Is having the website name making a difference or could this space be used for another Call To Action“
Finally, Remember to look after your loyal viewers as well – Frequent and loyal visitors get used to seeing the same old banners and after say, third time of continuous viewing of the same banner, learn to ignore it
I hope you enjoyed these few little advertising tips and banner guidelines and that they help you to start creating banners that work more effectively and efficiently.
Pros and Cons of Flash Ads
August 13, 2014 by Antonio Sawlwin
We Take The Guess Work Out Of PPC
If you are a regular internet user or a casual web surfer you might have noticed an array of banner ads with different designs and varied interfaces. If we keep the technicalities aside, banner ads available on internet are basically of two types namely, image based and Flash based. Here, we will discuss the various pros and cons of choosing a Flash based banner advertisement.
PROS
* Visual Appeal: A Flash based banner ad has a high visual appeal. They can be made to do transitions, change over’s, have rollover effects etc. All this is nearly impossible with a normal image based banner ad, unless some high level language scripting methods are used. For example, to play a Tetris game, a visitor is more likely to click a Tetris animation styled banner ad then just an image of Tetris game saying ‘Play Tetris’. Research has showed that people are much more likely to click on a flash based advertisement then a plain banner.
* Better interface: A Flash based banner interface can be a mesmerizing treat. Flash based banner ads are more than capable to create animation like changing text styles, changing images, mouse rollovers, image effects etc. With its easy to use and easy to make capabilities, a Flash based banner Ad takes the definition of an interface to new heights.
* Interactivity: This is one area where Flash based banner ads excel. With flash, banners can be made to have inputs and commands from users and act with appropriate responses. Flash based applications redefine interactivity and flash based banner ads do exactly that. For example a Flash based banner ad can be made to look like a calculator to calculate the EMI of a car and when a user click on the ‘OK’ button, he could be directed to the website that provides easy car loans.
Many more Possibilities
Flash based banner ads have opened up a sea of opportunities for advertisers.
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Flash based banners can be called the true competitors of television based advertising. With flash based advertising, one can even play videos in a banner! Add to that the interactivity of choosing the desired video to be watched and you have a sure visitor.
CONS
* Requirement: One of the biggest negatives of a flash based banner ad is it inability to be used on a computer that does not have adobe flash player plug-in installed. This requirement is easy handled by the petite size of the install, doing this is automatically prompted by the browser.
* Bulky: Flash banners are bulky; or at least the ones that are high on interactivity and have a rich interface. Due to the images and animation used in it, a flash banner becomes bigger in size and takes more time to load then plain banners. When a flash banner is being made, images used in it should be optimized so as to keep the size of the flash banner to the minimum.
* Annoying: Flash Banners can be flashy and claim attention from visitors. Many people, because of various reasons frown upon Flash based ads. Some claim that such ads prevent them from concentrating on the website’s content and hence they switch off flash content in their web browsers or try to visit websites that do not have flash based banner ads.
When they were first introduced banner ads literally became a rage. Everyone wanted to click on those colorful, flashy ads. One could throw in a couple of cool looking banners in a website and voila, there you have clicks and tons of money generated through them.
The more appealing the banners, the more was the surety of clicks. Apart from being an excellent alternative to television advertising, banner ads also provided an enhanced visual appeal to the website. The money that the banners generated with clicks acted like a cherry on top!
In today’s world, the things are a little different, with passage of time, people have learnt to ignore or simply pass by a banner ad. Internet users have matured since the late nineties and now they know what it does and why it is there. This phenomenon is known as banner blindness and is one of the biggest headaches faced by a webmaster or a web designer in deciding which or what banner ad to place. Unless the website visitors really need a product, they won’t click on that banner.
Conversion ratio relates to the conversion of a viewed banner to a clicked banner. I.e. the number of times a banner viewed by a visitor is actually clicked by a visitor.
The answer to these questions lies in effective selection, management and placement of a banner advertisement.
Placement – Proper usage of banner ads would still fetch money for your bank account. Well many companies are still doing it, and so can you. Initially, when the banner ad era came, banners were just available in standard sizes only. This created problems in proper placement of banner ads. To tackle this problem, there were only two possible solutions, either you place them anywhere and carry on with a haphazard looking website design or build your web design around the banner ads. Most of the professional webmasters chose the latter but because of lack of proper web design skills, many rookies were stuck with the first choice.
Size – A big change that has come since the time when banner ads first came is that back then they were usually of one common size. People grew over them and learnt to ignore them which caused banner blindness to many websites. Different sizes and shapes of banners ads were then conceptualized to tackle this problem. Research has shown that people click some banner ads more than other banner ads because of their size and shapes.
Choose Wisely – A greater variety in banner ads not only means that banner ads would become more ‘clickable’, it also means that now even rookie webmasters are able to better incorporate these banner ads into their website without compromising their web design. Now, instead of putting banner ads in common places, we can have them in headers, footers, sidebars and in-between the content also. Doing this takes the visitors by surprise and because they are not hoping to see a banner there and as such are likely to be more open to the idea of clicking on a banner advertisement.
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