by Today, we have a special interview at Bannersnack Ad Talk. Why? Because we’re talking with Raul Popa, Product Manager @Bannersnack. Raul describes himself as a “Future thinker, product strategist, growth hacker, lifetime coder, manager and founder“. He is passionate about innovation, building disrupting products, and using statistics and data to solve impossible problems in creative ways.
Blog: www.raulpopa.com
Twitter: @raulpopa
1. Could you make some predictions about banner advertising for 2015?
“I think that in 2015 banner ad campaigns will improve in at least 4 ways: tracking, segmentation through user data, banner quality and landing page optimization. You can already track results better, you can better segment your audience. You can also create better converting banners and test multiple landing pages. I believe this will lead to more calculated campaigns, decreasing the overall ad spend and increasing profits.
Advertisers will start looking more closely at results and will constantly optimize their banners and campaigns. In few words, it’s the start of intelligent advertising. One size doesn’t fit everything anymore and we’re going to see more of this coming in the year 2015.
Also search engine advertising is becoming saturated: overcrowded, overpriced and limited by volume. SEM advertisers will reach a level of non-profitability and will start using alternative channels like search retargeting (cheaper and better performing).
Online advertising budgets are now somehow splitted between search, Facebook, display and the rest (less than 5%). What we’re seeing now is huge amounts of money going to search (with good revenue, but decreasing margin), huge amounts to Facebook (increasing performance, but limited) and finally display is not what it used to be. Because of poor segmentation, traditional display lost traction for a long time. With retargeting, better user data and better tracking, we’re seeing an imminent comeback.”
2. What do you think about search retargeting?
“I think it’s the best kept secret to date. There are sooo many advertisers who don’t know about it at all. Impressions cost about a fraction compared to traditional SEM and you can reach the audience over both standard display and Facebook. What could be better? The only limit is volume. Unfortunately, like search, this method is limited by how many people search for the targeted keywords.
I think every company should do the following 3: search retargeting, retargeting and Facebook ads. If you’re not doing search retargeting, start now. Still, you can only do this through a few companies, and for budgets under $500 per campaign the only solution is Bannersnack.”
3. What makes a banner ad more likely to convert?
“Hard question. Unfortunately what follows a click can’t be correlated with how a banner looks like. And it’s extremely important to measure engagements on website to get to know how well a banner actually converts. However at Bannersnack, we’ve run hundreds of tests and we’ve found a few success predictors, especially for clicks (CTR). They may seem naive and unimportant, but I challenge you to try these out in your banner ads. You will see more clicks, I promise!
First, 160×600 banners perform about 2x better than 728×90 ones and about 1.5x better than 300×250. (btw, there are only 3 banner ad sizes that matter today: 160×600, 300×250, 728×90).
One thing that seems to work extremely well is Red, (and even Orange), especially when used as primary color with white text. Red works well as a secondary text color too. Worst primary colors are Blue, Grey and Green, especially when you don’t have Red as a secondary color.
What else? Each of the following bring in twice as many clicks alone: a button, a “call to action” and urgency. Use words like “now”, “today”, “only today”, “only this month” to attract more clicks.
We also found one single element that predicts even more clicks: the exclamation mark. It is all mighty! Make sure you have at least one “!” in your headline or in your call to action. Question marks work wonders too.
One more thing… if there is anything for FREE in your offer, use it on your banner! It draws people in.”
Thank you Raul!
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