Banner ads: four types of watchouts
I just wrote a similar article on this topic for emails (Emails: four types of watchouts), and realized I should do one for banner ads as well! A big part of my job for several years now is reviewing tons of layouts and storyboards for banner ads, flagging any issues, and making suggestions for corrections/improvements. The issues I flag fall into four big categories:
- Things that are not possible in banner ads from a dev perspective.
- Things that are not ADA-compliant and/or not best practice for accessibility.
- Things that are not best practice for engagement.
- Things that are not best practice from an efficiency standpoint — meaning the banner will take a long time to program/QA/route/etc, for no added benefit.
Another way to look at these categories is to think about the opposite of these things, and that's what a good banner ad should be: achievable in dev, 100% ADA-compliant, written and designed to be highly engaging, not too image heavy, and easy/fast/cheap to program. That right there is the formula for success when it comes to banner ads.
I'll break down these four categories a bit; here are some of the things I look for and flag when I'm reviewing banner ad layouts/storyboards:
Not possible in dev:
- Complex animated effects that are not possible to do programmatically, e.g. a 3D element spinning — although we can totally embed a video if you have that!
- Moving the AdChoice logo anywhere other than the top-right corner.
- Too much imagery; likely to exceed the media buy's file size limit. More than one photo that's full-canvas is usually too much, unless you have an unusually generous media buy. A complex background texture can also add a lot of file weight. Most gif animations or png sequence animations tend to be huge as well.
- For statics: including more than one link.
Not ADA-compliant:
- Bad color contrast.
- CTA that's not meaningful, e.g. "click here" or "learn more."
- Tiny text that's likely to become very pixelated and unreadable on Windows machines.
Not good for engagement:
- No visual difference from frame to frame.
- Way too many words. This often means way too many frames/scenes, too.
- Trying to tell a linear story.
- Font sizes that are smaller than best practice.
Not efficient for dev:
- Tons of complex, non-standard animation, e.g. dozens of small elements that all need to be animated in different ways.
The above lists aren't exhaustive, but they basically cover the main types of things I flag all the time. My hope is that if you can program your brain to think about banner ad best practices with these four categories of watchouts in mind, you'll be able to design better banner ads, and/or catch these kinds of things in banner ad layouts that you review.
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.