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Thursday, 8 May 2008

Big Banner Gripe. Literally...

I want more Big BannersIf you've been following this still fairly new blog, you'll have spotted I tend to be a bit of a moaner. Well, not wanting to buck that trend, I thought I would quickly turn my sights onto another thing about working with affiliate programmes that really ticks me off, this time to do with the actual creatives they supply. Today my gripe is about big banners, or more precisely, the lack of them.

Now, I'm a massive fan of the leaderboard (728x90) and use it on most of my sites in a prominent, above-the-fold sort of position. It's a great way of both attracting the eye of a potential clickee and also giving your site some 'by association' joint branding.

I like to serve my banners via my OpenX ad server, as this allows me to do all sorts of things like geo-target and rotate the banners as users travel through the site. I know many are 'banner blind' but I find that if you can get the right sort of relevant offer/banner, and given its position on the page it can get some good click through rates and conversions. As a result, I like to have a good selection of banners that I can add to each new leaderboard zone I set up, to try and combat this banner blindness.

So, the last few weeks I've been setting up my new upgraded BANS sites, and one thing I've done with them is add extra affiliate partners to the pages. I've also added my favoured leaderboard slot in its usual top of the page position. I've gone off to get a range of banners to add to OpenX to rotate in the position, and what do I find. Loads of them don't supply banners in theses sizes. It's been true in my bingo work as well, a number of sites don't supply 728x90 banners as standard, and frankly, by doing so, they're all shooting themselves in the foot and losing out on some prime real estate on my sites.

Here's a couple of quick examples on some recent sites, and I'm not including eBay as affiliate partners, these are the extras above the eBay focused sites.

And the list goes on. In bingo for example, the St Minver affiliate network now has 14 bingo sites on its programme, of which only 3 or 4 supply 728 banners as standard. I'm constantly finding myself frustrated at the lack of quality content at affiliate partners. Sure you can ask for custom built ones, but that just makes unnecessary work on my behalf, and becomes a pain to keep up with it all.

As a busy affiliate, I want an easy life, these things should be there as default. I don't want to have to waste time chasing up account managers and stuff to sort this now pretty standard banner size out for me. All these programmes have 468x60 banners as standard. All of them. Now, how hard is it to scale these banners up for the producers of them (with all the source files to hand) at the time of making the 468 banners? Please people in charge of the creatives, take a few extra seconds to add this size, then you can have my top slot and all those extra eyeballs for very little effort. It's a real no-brainer.

Posted by Dio Bach at 10:13

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