El Toro offers one of the best technologies available for targeting your message to online audiences, however great targeting can’t overcome poor ad design. Through our platform, we have access to a great deal of data on what works and what doesn’t work with display advertising. Strong ads can outperform weak ads by as much as 200% when measuring click-through-rate (CTR).  Simply put, better ads equal better campaign performance.

Let’s take a look at some crucial improvements that can increase your display ad performance:

1: Incorporate animation

While developing an animated ad requires more time and skill; it is absolutely worth the investment.  We’re not necessarily talking about a full video. Simply rotating text and changing images on your ad can have a huge impact. By reorienting the eye lines of the page you can get more people to notice your ad. Web conversion expert Benji Rabhan calls this the “Shimmer Effect”, because people’s eyes are drawn to the shiny, moving object. Based on the data we’ve seen from numerous client campaigns, this simple change can increase CTR by up to 60% over advertisements that lack animation.

2: Add localization

With targeted ads you will know where your prospects live, this is a huge advantage over non-targeted web ads. This advantage is something that should be leveraged. Psychologically people are interested in things they can relate to, like a city or neighborhood, so be sure to feature these localizations in your ad. The more granular you get, the better the results will be.

3: Reinforce personalization

Setting up campaigns with demographic segments allows you to speak to online consumers more personally. Say for example, you know your targets are customers of a competitor. Using this knowledge, you could state the name of the competitor in your advertisement to say how much the average consumer saves by switching to you. Another example, if you know someone is a pro-life Republican, you could say: “Special Message for Pro-life Republicans”.  Personalization is all about building a connection in the limited time a person is exposed to an ad.

4: Have a strong call-to-action

Tell consumers what they will get for clicking. Make clicking worth their time with perks like a special offer, or a free report or the chance to make the world a better place. Remember that a display ad's primary purpose is to get a click.

5: Architect your website or landing page to maximize conversions

Make it easy for people to sign-up or buy. You should make conversion as simple and easy as possible. Rather than assuming what techniques will increase conversions, test them using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics Experiments (you can find this under the “Behavior Tab” in Google Analytics). Another great resource for increasing conversion rates is Benji Rabhan’s book “Convert Every Click”.

In Summary

These simple steps can easily double the click-through-rate of a poorly designed ad campaign, while also increasing conversions at a faster rate. The reason for any advertising is to get more consumer conversions, so build your ads to be their finest.