What follows are a few tips about the elements you should be looking at when you're weighing up the possible environments for an advertisement or a campaign.

1. Consider the profile of the users

In much the same way as you would research the readership of a magazine or newspaper before placing an advertisement with the publication, you should investigate how well a website you're considering for an advertising placement matches with the demographics and psychographics of your target market.

Most major sites can provide detailed information across a range of demographics and psychographics, and many can provide detailed breakdowns of the gender, age, career, interests, income levels, and geographical location of their visitors.

2. Look at the content of the website

One should consider how well an advertising environment matches the identity of your brand as well as the objectives of the campaign or advertisement. Are you aiming for a broad audience or a special interest group? Do you want reach and frequency, or do you want to target a specific audience? The answer to these questions will help you to determine whether you should be placing your advertisement with a major general news portal or a niche content site, such as a sports or entertainment news site.

3. Investigate the unique opportunities the website offers

The online world is as cluttered with advertisements as the offline environment. For that reason, it is worth finding out about any unique opportunities a website offers for your ads to rise above the noise. These opportunities may include sponsorships, podcast and blogs, newsletters, and promotional mailers.

4. Check the creative sizes and layout of the site

The layout of the website is another important factor to bear in mind. What options are you offered for the placement of your advertisement - above or below the fold? How prominent will your advertisement be, and how much clutter does the website have? Does the website adhere to IAB standards for creative sizes, so that you won't need to develop creative for just one environment?

5. Ask about targeting capabilities

The ability to target audiences by demographics and psychographics is one of the most powerful benefits that online advertising offers. However, different websites offer varying targeting capabilities. If it is important to you to reach audiences according to their geographic location and other demographics, you should partner with websites that allow you to specifically target the users you want to reach.

6. Weigh up the costs

Cost is always important, but also think about value for money and return on investment. Most South African websites still charge per thousand impressions.

You should benchmark each proposed advertising environment against similar websites, and also bear in mind the opportunities on offer (you might be willing to pay a premium for a unique opportunity), the audience the website reaches, and the targeting capabilities it offers.

7. The site's track record is important

If an environment has worked well for you in the past, there's a good chance that it will deliver good results for you in the future, provided your creative remains fresh and your audience and objectives are similar.

It is worth looking at how the results an environment has produced for brands similar to yours, if you haven't advertised on the site before. Also consider the website's history - is it a credible, established website with a loyal audience?

Closing words

Most advertisers will need a mix of environments to achieve the goals of their campaigns. Apart from considering the elements above, they should also ask themselves about how well the mainstream and niche environments they use as advertising vehicles complement each other.

 

Banner advertising can be a powerful tool in the right hands. However, many South African marketers are failing to follow best practices in banner advertising, with the result that their online advertising campaigns aren't working as well as they should be.

What follows is a few tips about how to get the best possible performance from your banner advertising campaigns.

A few simple principles lie at the heart of these tips:

• Engage and interact with your audience;

• Keep your message simple;

• Start off with clear objectives for your ad; and

• Be respectful of your audience's time.

 

1. Set up a clear upfront objective

    

This point may seem obvious, but a successful banner campaign starts off with a clear objective that can be benchmarked against metrics that will tell you whether your banner was successful or not.

You need to decide upfront what your goal is (customer conversions, email database registrations, and so on), ensure that you have metrics to gauge success, and create an appropriate message for the goal.

 

2. Get straight to the point

 

Brevity is a virtue in banner advertising. Don't make people go through several animated slides to get to your key message. Don't cram your banner ad full of dense text. A simple pay-off line will almost always work better.

A related point to keep in mind is that banner ads with more than one message and one call to action seldom work - keep focused on one point in each banner ad.

Simplicity is also an asset in visual design - it's best to limit the number of colours, fonts, and graphics that you use in your banner so that your key call to action will stand out in the viewer's mind.

 

3. Tailor your message to your audience

 

You can't get away with placing the same generic banner ad across different online environments. If your ad will appear on an Afrikaans site, it will be more successful if you speak to the viewer in his or her home language rather than re-using your English creative.

A message that might be appropriate for an entertainment site may fall flat on a business-to-business portal. Think about the audience you'll find in a particular environment and tailor your message to it.

 

4. Create a clear call to action

 

Tell the people seeing your ad exactly what you'd like them to do - whether you want them to register for a newsletter, get in touch with a sales rep, download a white paper, or visit your website to shop or view information.

Using power words that communicate a benefit - 'free,' 'affordable,' 'incredible,' and so on - will help to crystallise your call to action.

Make sure that your call to action appears clearly on every slide in your banner. Remember people read from left to right and top to bottom, so placing your call to action on the left and the top will ensure that it is seen. Large fonts and wise use of colour can also be used to highlight the call to action.

 

5. Variety is the spice of life

 

Don't settle for only one banner - create a series of ads with different sizes, text, graphical treatments and concepts. If your ads all look the same, a user will soon ignore them.

What's more, if you have only one look and message for your banner ads, chances are that they will all perform at the same level.

If one fails, then all will fail. Creating a range of banner ads will mitigate that risk.

 

6. Pay attention to your landing page

 

If your banner ad doesn't take the user straight to the offer outlined in your call to action, you may lose that viewer, especially if they need to search for the relevant content or click through a series of pages.

The landing page must deliver on the promise you made in your call to action.

 

7. Don't get carried away with large files

 

In South Africa, many of the people you are targeting will be on relatively slow internet connections. That means it's best to control your file sizes so that your ads download quickly. You won't endear yourself to the people viewing your banner if they need to wait for it to download before they can see the web content they're after.

Be respectful of dial-up users and use bandwidth-targeting to ensure that any rich media ads you place are served only to users with broadband connections.

 

8. Stand out from the crowd

 

Think of your banner ad as an online billboard. It should stand out against the clutter and communicate a clear message that the user would be pick up, even if he or she was speeding past it on a highway.