Oh happy day! There are two new banner ads available in the Canned Banners gallery of templates. Click the thumbnails to start customizing these banners.
The first ad for “Condominium Park” allows you to upload 5 images that the user can scroll through. This ad also doesn’t require that your business have a logo. You can upload a nice little JPEG into the lower left corner, type your business name to the right and you’re good to go.
The second ad for “Ranch Springs Winery & Resort” is simpler and more dramatic. This banner works well for businesses that don’t have a transparent PNG version of their logo. Because the logo sits on top of a solid color background, the image file doesn’t require transparency to look good.
A brief tale about the Condominium Park template:
We used the Condominium Park template for a banner ad campaign of our own on Google’s Display Ad network. The campaign was disappointing for a number of reasons. Our average cost-per-click was only $0.54, but for some reason Google chose to show our banner ad on extremely irrelevant websites like FlameWordMaker.com, a site that generates tacky “flaming” text for kids to use on MySpace pages. So it’s not surprising that the ad got a low clickthrough rate (0.13% to be exact). When we run this ad again in another campaign (not with Google…we like them for search but not for display), we’ll update you on how it performs.
The moral of the story is: pay attention and make sure your ads are running on high-quality websites. If your ads get shown on low-quality websites, you won’t get very many clicks, and the handful of clicks you do get are not likely to be qualified prospects.
