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banner_ad_click_through_rateIf your ultimate online goal is to find new ways of driving people towards your website, then your first task will be ensuring that you get noticed. Companies from a variety of industries use numerous tactics, from email marketing, to social networking and banner ads. Though it's true that banner advertising may not have the same impact on consumers as it once did, that doesn't mean that it doesn't still have a lot of value.

If you find that your banner ad displays aren't bringing in the clicks and consumers as you might have hoped, then you may need to rethink your strategy and boost your banner appeal. Following, we'll discuss a few ways that you can improve the reach of your banner ads, and start collecting those much-needed clicks.

Avoid Banner Blindness at All Costs

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One of the main issues that stops viewers from "seeing" your advertisements comes in the form of banner blindness. This is an issue that has occurred within the World of consumerism today, as a result of customers becoming overly sick and tired of businesses attempting to sell products to them wherever they turn. If you want to make sure that your target market actually pay attention to your banner ads in the first place, then you'll need to be careful about every aspect of your ad campaign, from the way you design your creative, to where you place it, and how you make it intriguing and relevant enough to grab their attention.

Get Your Audiences' Attention

These days, it's getting easier for us to understand just how important the location and placement of banner advertisement can be, but that doesn't mean that the way you design your ad isn't just as crucial. One good way to fight back against issues like banner blindness or banner fatigue in your advertising campaigns is to use faces as part of your visual creative. According to technology that uses eye tracking tools to examine the effectiveness of advertising, people are more likely to look at banners with human faces, than ones without.

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It's also worth noting that it may be beneficial to invest more time in designing an advertisement that is aesthetically appealing if you want to get your audiences' attention, as people are more likely to pay attention to eye-catching ads.

Make Your Banners Relevant

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While you're taking the time to add visual appeal to your banner ads, it's worth making sure that the things you choose to advertise in the first place are relevant to your audience. Showing irrelevant content to people who don't care about your product or service can easily make your ads invisible to users. One of the ways you can improve the relevancy of your ad banners is to ensure that they are published on websites that target your specific audience. For instance, if you sell shoes, then you might want to show banner creative on other websites regarding footwear and fashion.

It's also possible to make your content more relevant by using retargeting methods - a technique that uses cookies deposited on an individual's browser to ensure that the creative you serve up is relevant to their recent searches and queries.

Be Unique and Creative

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The click-through rate for banners in the mid-nineties was much higher than it is today, and part of the reason for this is that banners were new and interesting things that most users hadn't interacted with before. Now that ads of this nature have been around for a couple of decades, consumers are used to their presence, and don't find them intriguing enough to be worthy of a click. That means that if you want to improve the impact of your banners, you'll need to think of ways to make them fresh, unique, and creative.

Using interactive and dynamic advertisement techniques can be a great way to break your target market out of their tendency for banner blindness. The more you give your audience an opportunity to engage with the creative that you are serving up, the more entertaining that creative is likely to be.

Avoid Adding Prices to Banners

Finally, since we've spent some time considering what you should do to improve your banner click through rate, it may be helpful to take a look at something you should avoid doing. If you're using banners as a primary way to advertise your product, then you shouldn't be placing the price of your product on that creative in the hopes of drawing in new customers. Usually, people will be more interested in learning what a product or service can do for them, than hearing about how great the price is.

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Remember, with banner ads, you only have a limited amount of real estate to use, so making sure that you make the most of that space is crucial.

Tim Nichols

Written by Tim Nichols

Tim Nichols is a founding partner at ExactDrive, a digital media buying agency with white label, reseller and managed service options available. ExactDrive plans, manages, and optimizes online advertising campaigns with the objective of delivering measurable value and empowering clients to find precisely targeted audiences. ExactDrive has offices in Minneapolis, MN, Milwaukee, WI and SouthWest Florida.

Tim Nichols is also a contributing author on Forbes.com.

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