Ten Quick Tips to Make Your Banners More Effective. The follwing is reprinted by permission from a speech at The Web Advertising '97 Conference by Peter Rip, Vice President of Corporate Development, Infoseek Corporation. Prior to joining Infoseek, Peter was a Principal at HARP Capital, an Internet and Communications venture capital firm. He has a Ph.D. in Marketing from Stanford GSB and was formerly a member of the Marketing and Behavioral Science faculties of the University of Chicago GSB. 12 May 1997: How can I increase the click through on my banners? At Infoseek get asked this literally every day. The fact is there is no definitive answer -- nor can there be. However, there is a growing body of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. In some cases, we know why. 1.Click Here. The easiest way to increase click through is to ask for it. A recent study by Infoseek found a 44% improvement in click through rates just from providing visual or text cues that this banner leads to more information. There are many ways to remind the viewer besides the two simple words "Click Here." Put buttons or arrows in the banner. Tell the view more information is available. Just do something that tells the viewer that they can interact with the offer. 2.Catch Their Attention. The first generation of Internet advertisements was the simple, static banner. Now more browsers support animated GIFs as the second generation. Animation increases the likelihood that your ad will draw the user's attention. Animation also generates more "clicks" than static banners, all else being equal. However, it may not increase the number of "qualified clicks." If the objective is generating qualified clicks, eye-popping animation probably doesn't help. However, animation can also tell a story -- Feature/Benefit, Problem/Solution. Using animation in this way can be very effective at both capturing attention and inspiring action from the right viewers. 3.Involve the Audience. The Third Generation (hard to believe there are three generations in 18 months -- welcome to the Internet!) is interactive HTML. HTML banners use device like pull-down menus, check boxes, and toggle buttons to have the viewer personalize the ad to their needs. These banners draw the user in, involving her in the personalization of the message. Involving the viewer in the banner lets the advertiser really "crawl inside the viewer's head" by shifting their thought process from content surfing and toward the marketing message. 4.Brand Appropriately. Banners are not effective for creating or re-postioning brands. They are effective means of extending brands in the new on-line medium. Advertisers with established brands often find that unbranded banners are more effective to generate clicks. This is especially true when the brands are not associated with new, on-line products or services. An established brand can actually suppress click through because viewers think they know (often incorrectly) what information is attached to the banner. However, existing brands which carry their existing off-line positioning onto the Internet can be extremely effective, especially when the brand is for a complex product or service. Examples would be automobiles, computers, or financial services. 5.Change Creative Frequently. The Internet is a hot, high-involvement medium. (Just compare how we sit back and watch television, but lean forward into our computers and drive them.) The nature of the medium means action occurs quickly, on the first few impressions. Viewers remember what they've seen and where they have been. Therefore, creative wears out quickly. Wearout depends on the reach and usage frequency of a site. Smaller sites with low reach and high frequency wear out the fastest. The conundrum of media planning is the more targeted the placement, the faster the wearout. This is truest of all on the Net. Each site's experience is different, because of their reach and usage. Our experience on Infoseek is banners wear out after about 200,000 to 400,000 impressions. Sites with smaller and more frequent users will see faster wearout. 6.Match Your Message to Your Targeting. State-of-mind matters. The Net is a mix of entertainment medium and information appliance. Someone using the Net to get something done is much more receptive to a targeted message than someone simply surfing. Messages that provide specific benefits can be very powerful when delivered to people poised to act. The key is in knowing the state of mind. How can you know the viewer's state of mind? Some sites dynamically create pages based on viewer requests. Ads tied to these requests are likely to have higher response, particularly when the ad contains a reference to the question or request. Pages which are solution-oriented, rather than merely informational, are more likely to have higher advertiing click throughs, when the ads are also solution-oriented. State-of-mind is an elusive concept to track, but when you capture it, its impact on viewer response is magical. 7.Don't Waste Time/Money on Contests. The mere offer of large payoff does not impact click through. An Infoseek analysis of over 2000 banners and 500,000,000 impressions found no significant improvement in response rate for banners offering a contest. Given the cost and legal complexity of doing contests on the Internet, this is one marketing idea that you can comfortably avoid. 8.Certain Truisms Remain True. Intrigue and sex appeal sells. Free is the best price. Special Offers feel special. Human nature is the same on-line and off-line. Not all these techiques are always applicable, but they certainly can improve response. 9.Less is More. The best way to get a response is to make sure the message is delivered. Many sites limit the size of ad banners to 10KB to 15KB. The fact is that the likelihood of the image being displayed decreases exponentially as the size increases. Although it flies in the face of response-enhancing methods like animation, the simpler banners (few colors, fewer images) load faster. If the viewer moves to the next page before your ad can load, it doesn't matter how great the messages or creatives are. 10.Be Systematic. The power of the Net is it adaptability. You can try lots of creatives, flightings, sites, messages, etc. The best advice is to plan a systematic set of variations of campaign variables so you can understand why banners vary in response. While most advertisers use multiple banners to find the one with the best response, very few actually design their campaigns with an up-front set of experimental variations to actually know why the banners were different. In the long run, this is the most valuable "click-through tip," because the knowledge you gain will be unique to your product and a proprietary advantage in the market. Finally, bear in mind that not all click-throughs are responses. New or infrequent users of the Internet are far more likely to click on ads than frequent users. This has direct implications for the types of sites and pages which are likely to attract new users and the click-through rate you should expect. However, many of these clicks are not responses at all, but navigation-via-banners. The real value of these clicks may be far lower than the clicks from frequent Internet users, because the click does not capture an ad response as much as it captures inherent attraction. What you don't know is how many of those light users actually hit the "Back Button" once they realized they went to your site! Although Internet advertising holds promise for as a medium with its own measurement, today effective advertising remains more art than science. Peter Rip, Infoseek http://www.infoseek.com/ Web Advertising '97 - Monterey, CA - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.e-land.com/e-news_pages/10info.html - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -