Affiliate Banner Optimization - 
Tips for Displaying and Positioning Affiliate Marketing Banners Successfuly.

by Elizabeth McGee 

When it comes to advertising your affiliate products, banner links can be a more powerful promotion tool than you may guess. Ready made banners are offerec by almost all affiliate programs and affiliate program networks for immediate download or code copying. Successful and experienced affiliates are used to take advantage of the banner advertising power by implementing them into their affiliate sites. The important thing you need to do to achieve higher click through rates and higher conversion rates is placing these banners in a very smart way or position within your affiliate website pages.

The use of banner advertising within a website is a very valuable resource of income. Also text based link advertising is a very valuable resource of income. The important thing is, to get the mixture between the two done correctly. It is imperative to implement banners where they will be successful and text link ads where they will create their optimum results. This means optimized click through and conversion rates to bring lot´s of affiliate income into your pockets.

In this article we will concentrate more on the banner advertising side of the game. How you will use them is your key to success. The success or failure of affiliate banner advertisings and banner click through rates ( CTR ) is often based on the fact where a banner is placed, what banner format you have chosen, how it is worded, the marketing power of the advertiser´s brand name or product. Also the the banner´s colors and eye-catching ability are important factors if you want your affiliate banners to create more than only a little residual income.

So what the heck makes a banner create a high C.T.R. ?

As listed above, there are several factors responsible for successful banner advertising. Let´s take a look.

Do avoid to use your Homepage or Startpage (index.html) for banners. If you feel they may be a good idea, do not use more than one banner in your Homepage. You should rathe make use of banners focused on pages that are designed for or around a particular topic or affiliate product. For example, a pet or animal site should display a catfood banner on the cat or catfood page, not on the page set up for budgies. Take great care that your banners or appropriate text links match the content and theme of the individual page that you want to place them on. Means on topic or product relevant content pages only.

Size does matter! Internet marketing research has revealed that banners of larger size are more likely to create click throughs than the smaller pixel banners. The traditional 468 x 60 standard banner is upon the most successful. What type of banner you choose is also a little up to your overall page design.

Animation within banners increases the eye-catching effect. This is based on the fact, that movement, which animation simulates, is attracting human attention naturally as a stone age reflex of survival. It generates attraction and curiousity. Animated banners have the ability to increase response rates by up to 25%. Using these banners at appropriate positions, e.g. at the top of your pages is absolutely O.K. and should be successful.

However, make sure not to have the quite opposite effect. If you are using flash animiated banners for instance, make sure they do not display amit of your text or above the animation structure, or move around the page or the like. An increasing nunber of websites is doing so, violating their visitors like someone waving a brochure right amit of their face. There are some clicks on these banners, yes. But 90% of these clicks are only done accidentically by stressed and annoyed page visitors trying to find and click on the little x well hidden somewhere in the banner, in order to close down these annoying flash banner ad. Using these bothering type of banners only drives your visitors away from your site, for a never come back! So make sure your animation banners are placed out of the range of text, so your users still get attracted by it, but have a positive feeling about your site.

The words you use for a banner are wisely to choose! They are very critical to success or failure of a banner ad. A good banner will demand for clicks by using attention grabbing words or short phrases. Phrases ans appeals like "Buy Now", "Read all about...", "Click here now", "Money Back Guarantee" are creating a "Call for Action" as marketers say. This call for action may be an old trick, but it is still very successful and can increase click throughs and conversion rates dramatically. Words of "Last chance", "Offer ends 10.11.2006" (always use a short period of time, which can be automated...), "only 24 hours left" or "limited time offer" create a sense of urgency and are also very successful.

Asking questions that generate emotions, such as "Want more money?", "Would you like to loose fat without feeling hungry?" or "Would you like to double your income?" are also converting promotion sentences. However, be careful about using the word FREE. While the word "Free" generates a high C.T.R., the sales ratio of these visitors however is not that high.

Banners that are asking questions are animating visitors to interact with the banner. Interaction is a good C.T.R. increasing tool anyway. A Flashing icon for ecample, where a visitor can point the mouse over and click on has also shown to increase click through rates by up to 20%. But make sure you are using very small flashing icons within the banners only. If you make your website flashing like a christmas tree all over, you will use credibility by your site visitors.

In contrary to what most webmasters and internet marketers think, banners at the bottom of a page have a three times higher C.T.R. than banners at the top of the page. At first glance, this seems to be surprising. The cause however, is that visitors are first at all looking for information. While reading the content text of the page, they naturally come to it´s bottom.

Once they have finished reading, they are more open to click on any banner that is being interesting or attractive to them. Same appears for text link ads or Google AdSense Text Ads, that appear to be very successful if they are placed right under the major page text. It is as if the page visitors, after reading the text are asking themselves: "well, where to go next?". The banner or text link may be giving them the answer.

A very good positioning point also seems to be the place at the lower right of the page, next to the scroll bar, which in research sometimes increased the click through rate by over 200%.

This is a critical issue. Use fast loading banners only. Banners should never have more than 12 K in size. Banners that are not exceeding 4 K are having a 3 percent higher C.T.R. than banners with over 10 K in size. You will not only miss out on clicks, but also on page visitors if your banners will take too long to load, making your complete page loading more slowly as well. Also, slow loading pages are receiving deductions in pagerank in almost all major search engines.

Refresh the banners within your website on a more or less regular basis. Banners tend to lose attraction weight after prolonged use. Even Yahoo has mentioned that banners are burning out after about 2 to 3 weeks of use. Allow your site to change it´s look from time to time when promoting a particular product. 

Some affiliate partners and affiliate networks do meanwhile allow for automatic banner rotation modules that they offer. But make sure you have sufficiant banner and theme selection influence and control when using these tools, otherwise banners may be displayed automatically, that have nothing to do with the theme or look and feel of your pages.

Summarizing it is all about knowledge and a lot about testing. Nobody can say for sure what works best for your particular site or page. Tests and theories are being published, however only you, the individual webmaster, can determine what really works best. Take the recommendations and tips listed above into consideration and start testing out a little to find your optimum banner strategy for optimized affiliate profits.