creating effective landing pages for coupons campaigns, a merchant wrote to me:
I am working on banners for my affiliate program. Read your article on the mistakes to avoid. Could you please provide examples of banners done correctly? [bold font mine]The above question gave me the idea for this post. Just as it was with my yesterday’s topic, “it is better to see once than hear a hundred times” /Russian proverb/, and I have therefore decided to make this another visual post. Here are the banners that I believe to be well-suited for affiliate campaigns:
88×31 px Apple button
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120×60 LowerMyBills.com banner
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120×90 Expedia banner
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120×400 Overstock.com banner
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125×125 JC Penney banner
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180×150 Expedia banner
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250×250 Adobe banner
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468×60 Priceline banner
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500×200 LendingTree banner
Geno, Great idea to show merchants and affiliates what a ‘good banner’ should look like. I would take exception however to the Overstock and Lowermybills banners. Both of these show the direct url of the site. While in many cases a visitor will already know the address of a merchant, I don’t think it appropriate to use the banners as further branding for the merchants website. In some cases a visitor may think to themselves “oh, merchant X has a sale, I’ll open another tab and go there.” As stated for well branded, large merchants there is not much to be done, however for a lesser known merchant, don’t use my affiliate banner as branding.
I fully agree with you, Steve. In fact I wrote about it in the banner mistakes article (point #4) too. I can’t believe I’ve missed the .com on the LowerMyBills.com and Overstock.com’s banners. It was precisely the reason why I excluded Priceline.com’s banners (all of them have the “.com” on them), and went with one for Priceline Europe (which doesn’t spell the full URL out) instead.
Yes, Steve is making a great point. Affiliates are no instrument for free branding.
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