What Makes a Good Digital Banner Ad?

This is the latest edition in our quick-and-practical Q&A style videos. Questions come from social channels, keyword analysis, and readers of this blog. A transcript accompanies each video.

What Makes a Good Digital Banner Ad?
“What makes a good digital banner ad?“
Banner ads are the ads that you see on websites and they can be in many different shapes and sizes. Believe it or not, people actually click on these things, and you can get a lot of traffic to your site through these banner ads.
Now, what makes a good one? Well, the first thing that you want to do is you want to have very strong visuals for this banner ad. That’s of critical importance, so you want to make sure that the background, for example, of the banner ad is not white. Think about how many websites that you look at are white, so you want to make sure the background pops off the page. That’s the first thing you want to think about.
The next thing you want to think about is the call to action. We call it the CTA in the marketing industry. The call to action is a button that should look very, very clickable, that is in the banner ad that invites the use to do something. So, download an ebook, discover more.
What’s kind of interesting is that there’s a lot of psychology behind language, behind those calls to action. For instance, people don’t really like to learn so you don’t want to say “learn more”. You want “discover more”, or “go here”, or something where they’re obtaining something or taking strong action.
The other thing in general is to make sure that whatever you design you choose can be resized so that it can fit a number of different dimensions. When you create a banner ad, you really need to create a set of six banner ads that can be very long and skinny, they can be square shaped, they can be tall, they can be sideways, they can be any number of different shapes. So you need to make sure that whatever design you do choose can scale to those sizes.