
Personalization and Localization
75% of consumers say they are frustrated when a business serves them content, such as ads, that are not relevant to their interests, whereas marketers who do use personalization notice, on average, a 19% uplift in sales. Personalization and localization is key to creating successful banners. With the average consumer consuming thousands of ads per day, anything that is not relevant to their interests will be ignored.
Color
There are two things you need to consider when choosing the right colors for your client’s banners: brand colors and color psychology. Brand colors: these are the colors used by your client on their website, logo, and other marketing materials. Color psychology: this is the effect certain colors have on our minds; different colors have been proven to evoke various emotions in the human brain.
Brand Colors or Color Psychology?
There is no right or wrong answer. Look at your client’s past adverts and view the colors and images they used so you can keep their brand consistent across all platforms. This should also be discussed before work begins so you know the parameters that you can work within.Words and Imagery
Words and images go hand in hand. The image should further emphasize the text and the text should further emphasize the image.
Calls to Action
Not every advert you create will need a call to action, but most will. A call to action must be easy to see and match the page the user is sent to. When using call to actions, you must analyze the page you’re sending traffic to in order to create the base of your advert. To reach your client’s objective of securing a sale, signing up to their website, or reading a blog post, you need the user to stay on their website once they click the advert. Customers may leave directly after clicking if there is no ad scent, that is the experience they see on the website is totally different from the advert banner they viewed.

Promotions and Offer-Based Banners
The primary objective for your clients will be to win more business, and most will do this by offering some type of offer or discount on their products. As a designer, you may not have data on your client’s bestselling products or most viewed item, and you may end up choosing a product image that you think looks good but actually doesn’t sell that well. As a creator of images, one of your tasks should be to learn more about your client’s customers and products. The difference between showing their bestselling item and an item that hardly anyone buys can be huge for click-through rates and conversions. The more data you have, the better you can choose product images to reach the client’s desired goal.Animation
As websites become more flexible, there are dozens of widgets and pieces of content that attracts the human eye. In most studies, animation banners always outperform static banners, but they can also end up annoying the user and devaluing your client’s brand if done incorrectly. While you want customers to click your banners, you don’t want to turn your banners into what we call ‘eye-bait’ (similar to click-bait). Eye-bait is when you use contrasting background colors or fast flashing images for the sole purpose of getting users to view your advert when on a website. As a general rule of thumb, the background of the image should not change color, only the text or images on that page should.

Jorrit Baerends
Jorrit Baerends is founder of Adpiler. Adpiler is a project management tool for banner production agencies. You can preview HTML5 banner ads to your clients and easily manage all of their feedback.
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