10 Banner Ad Design Tips To Get More Clicks and Sales In 2022

The average person’s daily dose of the internet may or may not involve Instagram, celebrity gossip, and hilarious cat videos. But one thing it most certainly includes is an abundance of ads every step of the way.

When marketing a product, great banner ad design is key to grabbing the attention of your prospects as they pour through a sea of memes. Putting together an ad design that stands out can be overwhelming because a lot goes into getting it right.

Creating a banner design that clicks with your audience isn’t easy, so this article offers fantastic tips to get you started.

Spoiler alert: We’re sharing banner creation lifehacks to make your design life SO much easier.

1. Consider your banner ad format in the ad design process

The first thing to decide is which ad format you want to use. Before we get into the most efficient way to design your banners, let’s talk about the most popular ad formats today:

• Photo: This is the most straightforward ad format: a single image with some text to convey your message. The saying that applies here is, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Focus on picking a powerful image that connects with your audience, as this will determine how well your ad converts.
• Video: This leverages animations or footage to showcase your brand, product, or service. Videos allow you to pack more information into your ad in a longer format, though most of them don’t run longer than 30 seconds.
• Slideshow: This is an excellent option if you want to combine photos and videos. A slideshow allows you to string together a series of images with effects, transitions, and sound to create an ad. It’s an affordable way to have an immersive ad that’s also faster-loading than a video.
• Stories: Best for mobile-friendly campaigns, stories are highly effective for popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. These are shorter, vertical videos designed to capture your audience’s attention.
• Carousel: Carousels let you showcase up to 10 images or videos, where viewers need to click or swipe through to see all the content. This is a terrific way to increase engagement as you tell your story or showcase your new products.
• Collection: Like a carousel, a collection highlights your brand in a way that requires users to click through and engage with the ad. This format hooks your audience with an introductory video, which leads to 3-4 images to focus on what you are selling.
• Playables: These interactive ads give users instant gratification by letting them try out an app within the advertisement itself. Playables are great for specific categories or niches like mobile gaming.

There are a lot of benefits that come with each banner format, so you may need to mix and match to get the most out of your advertising campaign.

That’s where a powerful creative automation tool like AdCreative.ai come in handy. All-in-one marketing automation tools like Marketo and Omnisend handle a multitude of channels and tasks, such as email, landing pages, and notifications. Other creative automation tools are more specialized in one or two areas.

Constant Contact gives you wizard-like power over email, Hootsuite makes social media management manageable, and AdCreative.ai tackles creative banner ad design at scale like no other. AdCreative.ai lets you upload your brand’s images and copy, then quickly generate ads in 2022’s most popular sizes.

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2. Know the importance of a call-to-action and value proposition in banner design

You already know you have an awesome product or service, but the people who come across your ad need a reason to believe. An effective ad invokes emotion to connect with your audience on a personal level. Ideally, that moves them to take some sort of action—like trying your product.

Incorporating your value proposition into your ad and making your call-to-action (CTA) clear directly impacts conversion rates.

A good CTA helps create a sense of urgency and makes it easy for users with decision fatigue. CTAs can be as simple as “Register Now” or “Download Now” or may run longer, depending on the platform’s character limit.

Here are a few things to consider to better connect with your audience:

• Pick at their FOMO: “Limited time offer. Get your first month free!”
• Powerful action words: Start with a strong verb like “buy,” “claim,” or “join.”
• Add numbers: “Order now and get 25% off!”
• Make a promise: “Find your dream home in just two weeks!”

Ultimately, if your CTA convinces customers to stay engaged after seeing your ad, it has done its job.

Once you nail down what you want to say, AdCreative’s integrated AI helps your CTA reach its max potential by optimizing things like font, text size, and placement.

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3. Select the right size for proper ad design placement

Choosing the best ad placements helps you reach different audiences for whatever you are marketing. Ad placement refers to where your banner appears, which influences the size, type, and location of your paid ad.

Here are different ad placements to take into consideration:

• Feeds
• Stories
• In-stream
• Search
• Messages
• In-article
• Apps

You’ve probably seen an ad with a blurry, stretched, or distorted graphic before. This happens because the banner was not the right size for its ad placement.

Designing a new banner for each ad placement can be extremely tedious and time-consuming without a creative automation tool. Let’s say you have the perfect banner design with a 1:1 ratio but want to place it where that size isn’t ideal. A tool like AdCreative.ai makes it possible to reconfigure your ad’s dimensions and download in portrait, landscape, or story format with just a few clicks.

4. Choose the right background for your banner design

The right background image plays a vital role in grabbing your audience’s attention.

According to Facebook for Business, here are a few best practices for image ads:

• Capture your product, service, or brand. Your customers want to see what you’re selling. Make sure the image you choose is relevant to your product and service. People don’t want to click on your ad only to feel tricked and disappointed to find something completely different on the other side.
• Focus on what’s important. Hold your audience’s attention by cropping out parts of the image that don’t add value.
• Upload high-resolution images. High-quality photos prevent your ad from displaying as blurry or pixelated. Your ads won’t convert if people can’t see what you’re selling!

Capturing the right image is tricky, and hiring a professional photographer to help can be pricey. Luckily, there are fantastic creative automation tools out there like AdCreative.ai that have done all the hard work for you. AdCreative.ai offers over 11 million high-quality stock images for free!

All you have to do is type in a keyword to search and browse AdCreative.ai’s library to find one that works with your ad design and the message you want to convey.

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5. Keep brand consistency in your banner designs

You want to make an impact when customers see your ad designs. People will remember who you are if your branding is familiar whenever they see you. A few important banner design elements to keep in mind are colors, fonts, and image arrangements. Consistency and uniformity are key to making a lasting impression.

Let’s deep-dive into color, one of the ad design elements a lot of new businesses struggle with.

According to studies, consumers’ brains use color to recognize products and the brands that make them. The psychology of the colors you use influences how people react and feel to your banners.

Here’s what each color conveys in advertising:

• Red: Energy, love, and confidence. Passion and warmth.
• Orange: Youthfulness and vitality. Friendliness and humor.
• Yellow: Happiness, warmth, and clarity.
• Green: Health, wealth, and balance. Environmentally friendly.
• Blue: Calmness and tranquility.
• Purple: Royalty and luxury. Wealth and spirituality.

It’s best to keep it simple and choose two or three colors to optimize your results. A good trick to get started is to look around and see what successful brands and companies are already doing. Organizations that are already established have spent big money hiring experts to perfect their colors, so might as well learn a little something from all their hard work!

For example, let’s take a look at two professional basketball teams in the NBA.

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We can see the Los Angeles Lakers are using purple and gold as their two primary colors. The New York Knicks, on the right, went with a combination of three colors—blue, orange, and a hint of gray.

Don’t be afraid to look around and gain inspiration if you are just starting out and haven’t quite figured out the colors you want to consistently use to represent your brand.

A creative automation tool like AdCreative.ai makes it easy to experiment with colors, so play around until you find a combination that works for you.

6. Test different ad design versions

Testing different ad design variations is a tedious and often expensive part of an advertising campaign. However, testing gives you the best chance to connect with your audience because sometimes the design you least expect to succeed ends up being the best-performing one.

Even then, different banner designs will perform better in different scenarios. As there are so many factors that go into a successful ad campaign, most marketing experts struggle to find the perfect formula. Artificial intelligence helps simplify this process and avoids the “let’s hope for the best” method by analyzing data from past campaigns.

Creative automation tools like AdCreative.ai learn what appeals best to customers to optimize your ad design variations quicker and cheaper than your traditional A/B or split testing approach.

7. Include a killer headline for your banner ad

With audiences being overexposed to marketing content and advertisements, a good headline will help you rise above the competition. Headlines refer to the second biggest-sized text on an image created with AdCreative.ai.

Even if your banner design is full of great information, a weak headline will hurt your chances of having a successful ad with high conversion. Writing compelling copy takes practice, but here are a few tips to get you started off on the right foot:

• Keep it relevant to your target audience: Tailor headlines depending on the audience you are trying to reach. This helps users connect to your ad on a more personal level.
• Don’t overcomplicate it: Simple is good. You want to grab people’s attention quickly and get to the point.
• Make it actionable: Ultimately you want an ad that converts. Use action words to encourage and motivate users to interact with your ad.

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8. Don’t forget to include a tagline!

Wait, didn’t we just cover this in the last tip?

Let’s make it clear: taglines are not headlines. A tagline (usually no more than eight words) is your brand’s slogan. It defines who you are as a company and helps describe what you are selling.

Taglines may evolve over time, but they should stay consistent across ad variations.

Here are a few taglines you may recognize:

• Allstate: “You’re in good hands”
• McDonald’s: “I’m lovin’ it”
• Nike: “Just Do It”
• Staples: “That was easy”

AdCreative.ai is a creative automation tool that makes it effortless to input your tagline and keep it consistent across your ads while optimizing its placement to make your banner design more appealing.

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9. Close the deal with a great banner ad description

If you’ve made it to Tip #9, congrats! You have successfully created an ad that grabs people’s attention. But now what?

When you picture a banner ad, you probably remember the imagery the most. But Google also cares about the “description” field that comes in tandem with the title and imagery. The description is where you need to really showcase what makes your business special or highlight what’s important about the content of the ad. According to Google for Small Business, great descriptions show your audience what’s different about your business and give customers an incentive to shop with you.

Take OpenAI’s GPT-3 language generator, for instance, which was called “shockingly good” by MIT Technology Review. The "Text Generator" feature within AdCreative.ai lets you take advantage of this very technology—and it’s included for free!

Use your ad description as an opportunity to go into more detail and really sell yourself. A good description alongside your banner design will help close the deal and land a new customer.

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10. Stay on top of it all with artificial intelligence and creative automation tools

Creating and putting together a banner design that just works is complicated. Even marketing experts struggle to get it right.

AdCreative.ai aims to simplify this for businesses, using the power of AI. AI-powered creative automation tools leans on machine learning and deep learning that takes historical data to predict the best possible outcomes for your ads.

Here’s everything you need to know about how AI-powered advertisement works.

Tools like Canva or VistaCreate are great creative automation tools that provide ready-made graphics and design templates for a plethora of digital content. But unlike with AdCreative.ai, configuring a design to various ad sizes and layouts is still a manual process.

AdCreative.ai leverages AI to focus on creating banner designs in minutes while optimizing them to connect with your audience and have high conversion rates.

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Time to get to work on banner ad design that converts in 2022!

Designing an awesome ad that attracts attention and connects with your audience can take your business to the next level. You’re off to a great start if you keep these 10 banner ad tips in mind.

Now it’s up to you to create engaging copy and piece everything together with creative automation tools. Also, as a bonus check out the new feature to generate social media posts.

To help streamline the process, check out AdCreative.ai and get $500 in Google Ad credits for free—just for signing up as a new user!