A Quick Guide to Designing Your Banner Ads

The banner ad designing is one of the essentials of starting an online advertising campaign. Whether you’re getting into CPM advertising or PPC, the banner design does play a vital role in the success and failure of the campaign. It’s not just about a single type of advertising, in fact, it does influence on every platform of advertising whether it’s Facebook, Adwords, or Mobile advertising.

The banner graphics is one of those things that highly impact the click-through rate of the banner ads. There are a few more things out there that could do the same such as the banner ad’s copy and ad’s colors. Because the message communicates and the colors attract the audience.

The purpose of this blog post is to come up with a brief piece of guidance to help you design the best banner ads for your next online advertising campaign. Of course, there are always terms and conditions that differ from platform to platform which you always have to look at before going forward. After reading this blog post, you could be able to design or help someone design the banner ads that would not just improve the clickability on the ads because they would also help in reaping the benefits.

How to Design the Banner Ads for Digital Advertising

Following are the key steps of designing the banner ads:

Understand the Target Audience

It begins with the proper understanding of the audience. If you’re not aware of who you’re going to target in terms of audience, you might not be able to design your banner ads effectively. For instance, if you’re targeting the audience with the age group 14 to 20, you might want to use the bright colors and attractive messages, whereas, if you’re targeting the people with the age group 40 to 65, you might want to use the smiley faces, decent colors, and thoughtful messages in the copy. All these things do matter in the process. You can only make these things work if you exactly know who you’re targeting. A brand doesn’t win at this if it doesn’t come up with the clear understanding of target audience.

Choosing the Right Size and Format

If you have already done a little bit of online advertising, you’d probably know that there are a few formats that you have to follow in order to design your banner ads. It doesn’t matter what size you choose, what matters is that it must be right for the campaign you’re doing. For instance, if your ad has an impactful and important text message to convey that requires a few words to be written, then you may not be able to do that in 125px x 125px, instead, you may have to choose 250px x  300px to pull that off. In fact, nowadays, there are different formatting in the banner ads that you may want to check out before opting a jpg or png format. You might have seen some animated banner ads on YouTube and other sites as well.

Designing the Banners

Once you’ve decided things like your target audience and the banner ad size and format to use, the next part is the actual designing. It’s the most important part of the whole idea. You can see, this blog post hasn’t made a jump to the designing part. Instead, I tried to set the stage and explain the essentials of the process. So that when you read this guide, it delivers you something useful. When it comes to designing the banner ads, which is our main goal, you have to be very confident that it’s not something impossible and you can achieve it. Because no one ever ran an online advertising with a single design. Similarly, you would have to design a few banner ads with the different designs. On the other hand, you can hire an on demand graphic design service to produce banner ads for your campaigns. The purpose of having multiple ideas in front of us is that we could compare them. Use Canva or PicMonkey tools to get the designing done. You can also hire the graphic designers using the platforms like Fiverr or PerPerHour. At this point, you should have done with your design inventory.

Experimentation with the Designs

The last part of the banner ad designing process is experimentation and it could only be done through running the advertising campaign. This means you’re not designing or editing at this point, in fact, it’s time to test out the designs. For those who can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on experimentation, they simply need to minimize the budget and keep an eye on the ad spending. You may have to end the campaigns and try out different ones at times. The purpose of this step is that you would have to test different banner ads and find which ones work best for you. The design, targeting, and copy have an impact on the ad’s result. Whether you’re advertising on Facebook or using the Google Adwords, experimentation is necessary. You’ll always find the advertising experts saying this as well.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to explain that banner ad designing isn’t just about using the software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to get the banner designed. It’s way more than that.

I’ve covered that you must know who your target audience is. Then, figure out, what kind of design they would love to see.

It is all possible when you understand your audience and design the banner ads around that understanding.

This article could easily be done by explaining a simple tutorial on designing a banner ad in Photoshop.

Would it have done justice to the cause?

Would it have helped anyone of you?

The answer is NO.

So, instead of writing a short and unimportant banner designing guide, I chose to do something better to help you out and produce something that really helps.

I’m sure my ideas of designing a banner ad will help you in your next online ad campaign.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a plan of doing online advertising or not. At least, you should know the importance and science of designing the banner ads.

Has this post made an impact on you?

If yes, let me know in the comments section.