Designing a Web Ad : Optimizing Web Ads

You now have a web ad which looks gorgeous to you on your computer screen. You need to make sure it looks gorgeous to your ideal target audience before you try to get them to click!

You may be using a monitor that is set to 800x600 and you may feel your photo of your chocolate cake is HUGE. However, try looking at that same ad on a screen set to 1920 x 1200. Your "cake" might look like a tiny pile of unappetizing brown mush! It is critical that every image you use be easy to identify and understand even at small resolutions.

It's not just the resolution you have to worry about. Different browsers and different platforms / operating systems can also have serious effects on your images.

To test this, be sure to look at the optimization charts at the bottom of this page.

If you are optimizing your ad to look great at 800x600 and nobody is using that size any more, then that is wasted effort on your part. Make sure your graphics look excellent at the sizes most users are using. If that means you recruit friends and family to help preview your ads on their systems, then add that to your development cycle!

So again, your images must be clear and meaningful even at small resolution sizes, even on Macs, even on browsers you do not normally use.

Send your ad out to as many people as you can to get their feedback on the ad. Ask them if the images appeal to them. Is the text easy to read at a glance?

Test Various Versions
One of the great benefits of the BellaOnline ad system is that you can test multiple versions of your ad side by side and see exactly how well they do. So let's say you create a web ad for a "Caring For your New Kitten" ebook you have created. You made the ad with Ariel font letters for the title, and a photo of a Siamese cat and a Persian cat, one on either side. That might get you a 2% clickthrough rate on the Cats site.

Now to experiment! Create one ad with a yellow background, and another one with a red background. Try one with Times roman letters, and one with Helvetica letters. Try one with stripey cats and another with spotted cats. You might be amazed at how a "minor" tweak in your ad can have spellbindingly huge results with your users.

But wait! Try making a version with two black cats during October and your clickthrough rate could jump to 10%! Use a cat in a Santa hat on the holidays. The possibilities are endless!

BellaOnline's system doesn't charge you more for more ads. You can run as many ads as you want, and start and stop the ad runs at any time. So you can load up 20 varieties of your cat ebook ad with different colors, different fonts, different photos. They will all rotate evenly through the system. Watch them for a while and see which ones do the best. Deactivate the others and now start making more subtle tweaks to the ones that are doing well. Make the cat image a litle larger. Make the background a little more orange. Run the changes side by side with the originals and see which gets more clicks.

In a very short period of time you can create the absolute ideal ad for the targeted audience, and reap the benefits of a steady stream of incoming traffic!

If you have any questions about web advertising with BellaOnline, please contact the BellaOnline Advertising Department. Enjoy, and good luck with your web ads!

Optimization Charts:
Browser Percentage Use
Resolution Percentage Use
Platform / OS Percentage Use

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