Banner Ads Beginners Guide.
Target Your Customers When They Are Online
What Are Banner Ads?
You’ve probably seen banner ads whilst surfing online, most websites and apps have square or rectangle spaces for digital adverts. There are multiple platforms known as publishers where you can manage your ad copies and bid for ad space, the biggest being Google Ads and there Google Display Network (GDN) which is across millions of webpages. The other platforms you can buy ad space include Microsoft Ads, Infolinks, Adroll and Amazon. Although as a beginner we recommend starting with Google the largest but also the best for small to medium businesses.
Why Work With Banner Ads?
The biggest advantage is you can reach users with targeted ads when they are browsing across the web. From this you can increase your businesses brand awareness and retargeting previous website visitors who have an interest in your business to influence their decision. With nearly all high traffic web pages, there are usually banner ad spaces available for you to buy.
With the Google Ads platform you will get tons of data with banner ads and the control to deliver what is best for your business. Want to appear for more customers? Simply increase your budget and push up your ad bids to appear more. With Google’s responsive display ads don’t even need to be a photoshop expert these days, all you need is two images cut to size.
In our experience banner ads are a useful channel to add to your marketing mix but are not very effective on their own. You need additional channels like search and social that are more associated with ‘action’ in the funnel to maximise the use of banner ads.
Banner ads tend to be associated with the ‘Awareness’ and ‘Interest’ in the funnel but a campaign retargeting customers from your website could impact the ‘Consideration’ of a user.
How To Do Banner Ads Yourself
Unlike Google search ads it’s not possible to make a SMART banner ads campaign and you will need to train. To learn how to implement display ads we recommend using Google Ads Skillshop. You will also need access to your website builder to insert the pixel for remarketing to previous website users.
Starting Out
Building a banner ad campaign there should be two main thoughts, firstly, who you are targeting and secondly the ad creative. Look at who you are targeting and how your ad creative can appeal to them. For example if your focus is bargain hunters make sure your sale price is clear. Another example if you are targeting younger demographics make sure the creative has a youthful feel.
When building your target audiences always think of the intent. If they’ve added a product to the cart on your website but not completed the purchase or the users been on multiple pages there is clearly intent on what you have. So you can retarget these users with display ads after they leave the website to keep them informed on your latest offers.
If you’re looking to build an audience of new users who have not been on your website we would recommend using Google ads custom audiences where you can build based on what users have been looking at online. Then think about what they’ve probably been searching for online in relation to what you are selling. The key is to test, some audiences may perform better than others, you can always pause the ad group that contains these audiences.
Educate Yourself
When it comes to making your ads in the past you would need to know how to use Photoshop or GIMP, that is no longer a requirement with Google’s Responsive Display ads. All you need to do is crop images to size to meet Google’s requirements. You can use this free tool if the image exceeds the file size limit you can always compress your assets here. Then you can insert the ad text yourself in the fields provided. These simple ads can be effective as they will adjust in size for multiple ad spaces, compare this to the time consuming and the one-dimensional image ad asset.
Of course, we recommend you should try to have both image ads and responsive ads in your ad groups for Google to optimise. I recommend these courses if you want to take the time to learn about photo editing software, a good skill to also have to brighten up your website and to impress your customers. If you don’t have the time for this Google Web Designer is an easy platform with all banner ad templates pre-installed. The tool doesn’t take much training but is somewhat limited with its templates. You can train for it in Google Skillshop.
Final point is to keep testing your ad copies where ever possible. With Responsive Display ads you hand over some control to Google, filling out all the fields will give Google more options to personalise ads for your customers.
The Future
Once you’ve mastered Google Ads and a professional image editor we recommend moving on to Microsoft Ads which has a similar platform. Then you can explore Adroll, Infolinks and Amazon if these channels are right for your business.
Useful links:
Google Ads Skillshop – Learn how to do Google Banner display ads.
Google Ads Platform – Create & manage your ads here.
Microsoft Ads Platform – Create & manage your ads here.
Photoshop – Graphic design editing software to help build ads.
GIMP – Graphic design editing software to help build ads.
Google Web Designer – Although somewhat limited for design. If you’re short on time and not a trained coder, this has many banner ad templates pre-installed for easy work.
Wordstream Newsletter – Good source on the latest in display and recent tests.
Engine Land Newsletter – Good source on the latest in display and recent tests.
Our Blog – Learn about our work with banner ads.
How We Can Help.
Display Banner Ads platforms can get a bit overwhelming, you need to put a lot of time in to master this channel and with Google regularly adding new features and making changes. We’re here to help! Drop us a message and we can provide some free advice. If it still proves too much you can potentially hire us if we have space. Find the contact form here.
The Author.
Tom Haynes
Worked with Google Display Ads for two years, has experience running multiple banner ad campaigns including eCommerce, travel and construction.
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