Banners
or Text Links?
One
thing I hate as a surfer, is coming to a website and finding
'gordy' banners flashing at me from all over the page. To
be honest, it makes want to go somewhere else, and more often
than not I do.
Banners
need to be used sparingly, especially for the novice,
the temptation is to add as many banners and links to your
merchants as possible in the hope that it will mean more sales
and more conversions. I don't think you could get much further
from the truth.
There
are many surveys that have been done on the web, and many
reports that show that a significantly higher amount of
poeple click through from text links that banner links.
In my personal experience I get a much higher click through
with text links than I do with banners.
But
all said and done banners still have there uses. If for example
your page is a splash page or advert for a particular merchant,
it is nice to have some graphical item on the page, and if
you pick the right banner it can be even more useful as it
will highlight a special offer, or use some clever advertising
slogon for you. I like to have one banner about half way down
the page when using landing pages for merchants. They don't
often get clicked on, but they help make the page look interesting.
This is the only banner on the page. I used to have a banner
at the top of every page aswell, but to be honest it was incredibly
rare that anyone clicked through. So to keep my page looking
interesting I removed them and stick to just the one.
Text
links on the other hand are a great way of getting someone
to click through without them feeling as if they are having
it forced onto them. Its proven that people don't
like the hard sell, they don't like it when things
are pushed on them and it can really affect your CTR. But
if the link is within the context of your page, and doesn't
say something terrible like 'click here now' then poeple will
more likely see it as a usefull sugestion, rather than an
obvious sales pitch. And you will see your CTR (click through
rate) soar. |
