A web banner or banner ad is a popular form of advertising on the Internet. As you’ve probably noticed while surfing the Web, there are different types of banner ads. Banner ads are usually small image files in GIF or Adobe Flash format embedded on a web page, their presence on the Internet and their importance for many online business is immense.

Banner advertisements appear on all sorts of websites and has different appearance and subjects, but they all share a basic function: attract eyeballs and clicks. Similar to a traditional ad you would see in a printed publication such as a newspaper or magazine, a banner ad tells website viewers information about advertiser, with the added ability to bring a interested customer directly to the advertiser’s website.

Banner ads come in a variety of shapes, formats and sizes. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) specifies different banner sizes according to pixel dimensions. IAB standard banner sizes are not the only banner ad shapes and sizes, but they are a good representation of the range of common banner ads. And the actual creative of banner ads varies considerably. The simplest online banner ad is a static GIF or JPEG image, with a HTML link to the advertiser’s home page.

Advertisers usually measure effectiveness of their banner ad performance base on click-through rate (CTR) — which describes the ratio of page views to clicks. It is expressed as the percentage of total visitors to a particular web page who actually clicked on the banner ad after viewing. The typical CTR of most banners is under 1 percent, and CTR significantly higher thanthat are very rare.

The decreasing CTR of banner ads prompted a new crop of internet ads to be born. In order to capture more visitors attention, many banner ads are now designed using flash to add multimedia elements including animation, sound, video, game, and interactivity. These interactive banner ads often outperform their static counterparts by more than 200%.

Website visitors are more likely to notice banners that have moving pictures or fun and playable. Example: if you have a small flash game embed inside a flash banner, many visitors will play that game, and be redirected to your website after they have ‘win’ or ‘lose’ the game. Although interactive banners are usually larger in terms of file sizes, the popularity of broadband Internet connection has increased its popularity as most web surfers can now see these ads a lot faster than the dial-up era.

With so many banner ads on different websites competing for viewer attention, it is important to plan your online banner ad campaign carefully, and only place banners on related website to attract the correct target group of audiences. You should also outsource your banner design to professional banner ad designers, because an attractive, interactive banner ad can perform significantly better than a boring, static image, so to maximum the return of your online advertising campaign.

Before you contact a banner ad designer, ensure you have your requirements for the banner ad listed clearly first, including the text line, images, preferred color theme and landing page for the banner to link to.

There are many advertising agencies and professional designers you can contact online to create professionally looking banners, give you access to their design and programming skills, banner templates, and also their creativity and extensive experience.

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