31 March, 2015

How To Create Better Banner Ads: Automotive And Entertainment

By Emma Mackenzie

Those who create banner ads for clients in the automotive and entertainment businesses, it’s time to listen up.

Last week B&T touched on some new research from programmatic buying company Rocket Fuel which looked at which type of creative works well for banner ads.

The report the previous Monday was a general viewpoint of how to make your banner ads better, but we’re delving down into some of the verticals mentioned in the report to see exactly how each one differs.

Automotive

So if you’ve got fancy cars as a client, this is how you make their banner ads work better.

Rocket Fuel looked at 367 campaigns that gave of three billion impressions.

In terms of the colouring in the ads blue cars tended to drive the highest conversion, but were only used 11% of the time. Red cars were used the most often in ads at 22%, but didn’t show as much conversion rate as green and black cars.

When looking at the background colour of the banner ad, white dominated over all other colours, in both use in ads and increasing conversion rate. Black only showed a slight increase in conversion rates over grey, even though grey was used more.

And while it would be odd to have a car ad without a car in, ads that managed it somehow were able to generate a higher conversation rate than those with vehicles. Limited time offers too worked well, but not those with generic offers. But always show the price as ads with dollar signs performed better.

Logo placement is also crucial. “Auto ads that placed the logo in the upper left or lower left averaged higher conversion rates than those that place their logo elsewhere,” explains the report. “Interestingly, advertisers frequently places logos in the lower right corner. However, this area was associated with lower performance, indicating an area for creative optimisation.”

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Entertainment

If you’re creating an ad about an event with a celebrity, always put the celebrity in. “Showing the artist or star of the featured attracted improves performance,” explains Rocket Fuel. “Ads that featured an artist or celebrity have average conversion rates +56% higher than those without one, regardless of the gender of the artist.”

However gender of the artist appears to matter in ad creative. Male celebs included saw a higher conversion than those with females.

The strongest performing background colour in the entertainment category was red, but only 7% of the display ads looked used this hue. Some 22% of the ads investigated used blue, which was still a strong colour, yet green once again came second.

Including the cost of tickets in the ad is rare, according to the study, but the ads that included pricing saw a +213% increase in conversions.

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There’s still a number of verticals left in the study, so stayed tuned for your vertical.

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adapt Advertising Standards Bureau wordstorm pr