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.