Increasing the performance of your online banner ads is essential for improving your Internet marketing ROI. By following these simple steps, you can optimize the performance of your banner ads and improve that rate at which prospective buyers take action.
1. Design Your Banner for Specific Sites.

Targeted marketing outperforms mass marketing 2 to 1. If you’re planning a specific banner advertising campaign, then chose a specific website where your prospects are visiting and design your banner for that website.
Banner ads that closely mirror the look and feel of the site upon which your ad is placed usually have the highest click-through rates. However, you may also try a design that is of stark contrast, to see if it produces greater results.
2. Animate Your Banner.

Research supports the fact that animated banners outperform static ones by a significant margin. This is because an animated banner is more likely to get noticed. There are various techniques you can employ such as blinking or movement when designing your banner. Try to stay away from static banners that only change when the page is reloaded.
3. Keep Copy Brief and Provocative.

Using words like “Free”, “Act Now”, “Click Here”, and so on are effective at getting a browser’s attention and encouraging them to click through to your offer. Try a number of different headlines or action verbs and see which results in the highest click-through rate.
4. Test multiple Design formats.

Create more than one version of your banner and numerous version types. The most complex banners (those which resemble Windows dialog boxes, scroll bars, submit buttons or blue-colored underlined hyperlinks) generally get the highest click-through rates. Some have even been known to receive more than 7%.

Test each banner for a period of 72 hours and see which has the greatest click through rate. Use this as your control and continue to experiment in an attempt to enhance your click-through rate by changing one element of the banner at a time. If you change multiple elements, and a change in click-through rate results, you won't know which element had the most significant impact. This is why it is important to take a slow and deliberate approach to updating your banner ad.
5. Use a Professional Graphic Artist.

Creating a banner ad today is much more complex than 3 years ago. You really want to source the creation of banners to a professional graphic artist. You can also visit some helpful sites with searchable databases of Marketing Experts like MarketingScoop.com or Elance.com to find a designer who can design a banner in the size you need it. It should cost you no more than $100 per banner and the results will be worth it.
6. Reduce The Graphic Weight of Your Banner.

If your banner is too heavy, it can reduce the speed at which a webpage loads. As a result, you can lose potential browsers of your banner ad. Attempt to make your banner file size less than 15k. Although this weight is a bit unrealistic for rotating banners, it’s a good benchmark.
7. Evaluate Performance Daily

Review the stats of your banner on a daily basis. Most banners show an average click-through rate of about .5%. These days, a traditional click-through rate of 2.0% is good, but sometimes difficult to achieve. If after 3 days, your banner hasn’t produced an acceptable return rate, then switch it out with another version.

Continue to optimize your banner by changing only one element at a time as discussed above. Also, be sure to advertise on multiple sites to see which produce the highest click-through but also the highest ROI. Some sites generate a lot of clicks but no-one buys. Obviously you want to reallocate your spend to those that show the highest click-through rate AND conversion.
Summary

By leveraging these simple banner secrets, you can make your web banners really perform. Be sure to use these techniques for online advertising buys as well as affiliate advertising. Wherever your message is posted, get prospective customers to click-through and take action.

In addition to optimizing your banners, focus on optimizing your landing pages. Just as banners benefit from compelling copy and design, so do landing (offer) pages. As described above, begin by measuring your conversion rates and change your landing page elements one at a time to increase your overall conversion percentage.