If you are advertising online with what is commonly known as a “banner ad” you know the agony that goes into choosing the perfect image to represent your company. A great banner ad with a snappy tag line can lead to more clicks, and more clicks mean more visitors, more visitors mean more sales.

 

Here at Kingston Businesses Online we decided that it was time to update our old banner ad. We received some criticism on our boring old ad (below). As you can see it is pretty basic, and yes, pretty boring too.

 

Old Banner

 

People were clicking on it, visiting our site, but like any selfish business we wanted more eyes pointed at KingstonBusinessesOnline.ca!

This new animated advertisement (below) is simple, yet effective. Eye catching, but not garish.

 

test.gif

 

This banner is an animated .gif file - there are many different ways a banner animation can be created:

  •  CSS3 - These can be eye catching and stylish, but certain CSS3 attributes are not supported by all browsers, so that can limit your audience.
  • Adobe Flash - this is a classic banner type that you still see all over the place. Here's an example from the BBC. This method has fallen out of favour because a lot of devices (Apple devices mainly) do not support Flash.
  • Animated GIF - As I said, this is what we used for our banner. It is fairly lightweight, easy to get nice, simple, animations and compatible with basically everything. You often see these types of animations in your email.
  • HTML5 - These can be complex and tricky to get right, but the results can be fantastic.. HTML5 is relatively new, so compatibility is not quite there - HTML5 is not fully supported by all browsers. CSS3 is heavily used in this type of ad so there is some overlap between CSS3 browser incompatibilities and HTML5 ones.

We don’t have the marketing statistics to compare the new banner to the old one. Expect an update to this article in a few months when we have solid numbers on visitors clicking this new (and hopefully improved) banner ad

The numbers are in; ad clicks are up 114% in a month-to-month comparison. We are now trying a new NEW ad (below) as part of some A/B testing to see which animated banner is most effective.


kingston businesses online new ad

If you want to know more about online advertising, banner ads, or how this little marvel was made; feel free to contact us to chat.