Proven Strategies to Reduce Bounce Rates with a Creative Banner Design
A lot of people are saying that banner advertising is dead. This is not true. Traditional banner advertising with creative graphic design has just become obsolete and it needed to evolve like everything else. The problem is that people think that they can use banners the same way as 5 years ago and expect to get good results. Banners are still effective if you know how to use them; you just have to dig a little deeper. One of the reasons why they are such a valuable marketing method is the fact that they are very cheap when you consider the potential they have.
Additionally, modern banner ads are much more versatile and they can be used for more specific purposes. One of those important business metrics that can be improved with banners is the bounce rate. This represents is the number of people who visit a website page and leave it immediately without taking any action. You might wonder what does this have to do with banners but bear with this post a while longer and you will see.
Inner-Website Banners
Traditionally, a certain website had to create a banner and place it somewhere on some other page where there is high-quality content and a lot of visitors. This was done in order to get valuable leads and attract web traffic through your banners. Although you can still do this, there is a new way to approach banners.
When a visitor comes to your landing page, he or she might decide to leave for various reasons. This is why marketers came up with a new strategy of placing their banners on one web page that leads to a different page on the same website. So how does this help?
Well, it’s quite simple. Thanks to a banner with a creative design placed on your website, you can reduce the chance of visitors bouncing off from your site. Instead, you are giving your site another chance to try and entice the visitor and make them browse and perform some actions.
Who knows, maybe your landing page didn’t have what that person was looking for and some other page of yours might be more interesting to them. Maybe the visitor was distracted and didn’t see what he was looking for. A creative banner design is noticeable and enticing and can immediately make a visitor more open towards something. This brings us to the next strategy.
Breaking the Ice
Creative banner designs have the ability to invoke emotions in people and make them perform actions. If a banner is good enough to make someone click on it, that person will immediately be more open to taking action.
Of course, this is not always the case, but if the banner has lead the user somewhere expected, there are bigger chances that this person will stick around and do something. Even if it’s not what they expected, users will probably be more open and interested in going through that page since they already clicked on the banner.
Good banners are not easy to make and they have quite limited resources to entice people. However, if you are able to make a person click that small box that says “cheapest price here” or shows some images that spark interest, then there are even greater chances that the user will genuinely be interested in the page he/she landed on.
Strategically placed banners
In the past, people focused on quantity when they created banner ads. The whole thing was quite simple. You just looked for a website that had a lot of traffic and hoped that a lot of them will click on your banner and get to your page. You do this with as much as websites as you can and hope for the best.
In a way, it worked similarly as spam, and it actually didn’t improve bounce rates; it only made them worse. You might wonder why this was the case and the answer is quite simple. Those web pages which sold spaces for banner ads had a lot of traffic, but it wasn’t a homogeneous audience.
This means that the people who visited those pages had various interests and reasons why they came there. Only a small percentage of the audience had interest in what the banner address offered and this resulted in many of them leaving instantly. However, today, you can find targeted addresses where you can find people who have an interest in what you have to offer.
If you place your banners strategically and focus on quality instead of quantity, you will be able to improve your bounce rates.
Creative Pages and Banners for Great Results
In the past, people didn’t care much about how much their banner ads and the pages they lead to were relevant to each other. All that mattered to them were clicks. They didn’t even focus much on making creative banners that can attract people to click on them.
Not only this, but they also didn’t keep in mind the relevance between their banners and the pages they led to. Like I mentioned in the previous paragraph, they just focused on quantity and placing as much banner ads as possible.
Unrelated and non-creative pages and banners that led to them just meant that the people who drop there will leave instantly and that only a small percentage would even click on the banner. If you make your banners coherent in telling the same story and follow the creative formula you used on your page, then you will be able to increase the results drastically.
Getting creative designs that send the same message across all channels can go a long way.
So, there you have it; I hope this post has given you a fresh perspective on banners and how they can improve even one of the most seemingly unrelated website metrics. There are a lot more benefits of banner ads, but we’ll leave those for another occasion.
Banners are not dead; you just need to know how to use them to your advantage. If you know how to create a good banner marketing strategy, you will be able to get great results for a low amount of money.