How to Create the Perfect BlogAds Image Ad
Despite the bargain basement CPM rates that many of its publishers offer, BlogAds is still a relatively underused ad network. For that reason, you’d be hard pressed to find a quality tutorial for designing ads for their platform. Many advertisers don’t seem to distinguish them from any other banner ads, and it shows in their work.
To begin, let’s take a look at why BlogAds ads are different from standard banner ads.
- BlogAds offers a hybrid of text and image. Regular banners can only include text if you work it into the image. With BlogAds, you get an image, a headline, and a block of text beneath the ad.
- With BlogAds, you have the ability to view the site that will display your ad before it actually goes live. With many other ad networks, you design the ad and then loosely define terms that will hopefully cause the ads to show up where you want them. That’s not always true, but it’s certainly the case some of the time. With BlogAds, you get to pick the site, check it out, and see what the other ads on the page are doing.
- BlogAds are tiny. The standard BlogAd size is 150×200, and their mini ads are just 150×100. They offer a larger option (150×600), but many sites in their network don’t support those dimensions. Standard IAB sizes are typically much larger, with sizes like 468×60, 120×600, 300×300, etc.
What You Can Do:
- Since you have the ability to use both text and an image, do so. Some advertisers prefer to rely entirely on their image, but I see no good reason not to take up every pixel of screen space that you’ve purchased.
- Try to avoid using a lot of text in the actual image portion of your ad. A couple of very important words or a single short phrase may work, but if you say more, you run the risk of overcrowding your image or being forced to use a font size that’s too small to be read.
- Create an attention-grabbing headline. Obvious, right?
- Include text below the ad, and take up as much room as possible. That doesn’t mean that you have to SAY a lot, but use all your line breaks to make the ad take up more room on the screen. In case you’re not sure what to say, consider a few of these possibilities:
- A brief summary of your product/service. If you have a unique selling point (like free shipping or worldwide shipping, for instance), this may be a good place to plug it, especially if there was no good way to put it in the image.
- A compelling quote or two about your service. This is especially true if you’ve gotten any good reviews from the media or a public figure.
- A list of important sections on your sites (Men’s Clothing, Women’s Clothing, Accessories, etc.)
- A unique or intriguing question or passage. Audi did a very successful campaign with a stolen car premise. As long as you don’t look like you’re trying too hard, this technique has potential.
- Sales & Promotions.
- WTF - If your product/image is eye-catching but not totally self-explanatory (we can’t all be so lucky, of course), the text gives you a chance to explain before you lose your viewer completely. It’s an advantage that you don’t always get with a typical banner ad.
- Use additional links in the text. You can use simple HTML tags to format your text allowance. If you want part of your text to be bold, surround it with <b> and </b>. If you want part of your text to be italicized, use <i> and </i> to make it so. And if you want certain words to link to certain pages, do it like this: <a href=”http://www.xxx.com”>Text you want to be able to click on</a>. In place of XXX.com, you can enter the specific page you want to link to. Links will appear to be underlined, and they’ll generally show up in a slightly different color, so this can draw extra attention to your ad.
- Tailor your ad to the blog. PerezHilton.com likes to use Microsoft Paint to draw all over pictures that it posts. If you were advertising there, you might have success by drawing on your ad image. ICanHasCheezburger.com posts pictures of cats with funny captions that are written in “Cheezburger speak”. Doing the same with your ad’s image will let them know that your ad it tailored to their audience. Yes, it will take more time, but blog readers are generally a fairly educated bunch, and they are usually quite familiar with the locations of ads on their favorite sites, so it can take a little extra to break them out of ad-blindness mode.
- Finally, remember to experiment. Unlike a lot of site-specific ad buys or networks, BlogAds gives you a huge amount of control over where, when, and what you display. If an ad isn’t doing as well as you had hoped, just swap in a new one. Even if an ad IS doing well, this is probably advisable every 5-6 days throughout your run. Since a large percentage of the average blog’s audience will be made up of repeat visitors, you need to keep things fresh to keep their attention.
Any additional tips? If I’ve missed something, let me know by e-mail at advertisersaid (at) gmail.com, or leave a comment below!