Four Ways to Create Better Ad Campaigns

We have an awesome creative team at HasOffers that refreshes our advertising creative anytime we’re ready to test a new campaign. I’m starting to feel spoiled because I haven’t always had that luxury. I’m guessing many of you aren’t that lucky either.

When someone with little or no design experience gets put in charge of creative, the results can be less than compelling. Having been that guy, my solution is always outsourcing (at least until now).

Great offer creative is essential to any successful affiliate program. I’m often surprised at how frequently I see offers that have virtually no creative or a stagnant library of creative that changes less than once a year. As an affiliate, my solution is often to simply create my own banner assets, though I’ve found a few programs that frown on that approach. If you run an affiliate program, you really owe it to affiliates to keep the creative fresh, so they have plenty of options to test for conversion performance. With that in mind, here are four great resources for making better banners.

PointBanner

Custom made banners with a 48-hour turn around time is hard to argue with. PointBanner offers four different packages starting with their basic package, which includes three banner sizes. Depending on which package you choose, the price per banner is $29 all the way down to $15. You get three revisions with each pricing tier, so you can get banners that look the way you want quickly. Designers are familiar with all IAB ad sizes and can do either standard graphics or Flash.

CannedBanners

When you need a new banner in the middle of the night or simply want to start a new campaign quickly, building your own banners from a template can be a great alternative to custom designs. CannedBanners offers templates for 300×250, 728×90, and 160×600 banner sizes. You get to choose from a selection of color palettes, pick the appropriate font, add a logo, and customize text for each of the sizes. When you’re finished designing the banner, simply review it and checkout. For a flat $25 fee you’ll get a ready to publish graphic suitable for a variety of online campaigns.

HTML5 Banner Maker

Apple mobile devices present a new challenge for banner design, because Flash ads aren’t supported. HTML5 Banner Maker hopes to address that issue by building out HTML5 banners instead. This is both the most affordable solution on my list, with unlimited banners for $24 per year, as well as the solution requiring the most graphic design skill. The banner maker gives you something close to a blank canvas, with the ability to layer on just about anything you can think of in terms of text, animations, color schemes, and images. The end result will function on iPhone and iPad devices, though you might also get the same performance by using animated GIF images.

99designs

I’m a huge fan of outsourcing graphics work to 99designs. Banner ads from 99designs start at $149, which may sound expensive compared to other offerings on this list, but they offer something the others don’t. With 99designs, dozens of graphic designers audition to create a banner ad for you and you pick the one you want to work with. If you find multiple designers that you want to work with, you can contact each of them and acquire multiple creatives for a very reasonable price. In many cases, you’ll also find a graphic designer that you’ll be able to use on future projects, which can make the initial $149 price more attractive.

None of these options is a replacement for an amazing in-house graphic design team, but if your needs for new creative are infrequent, it definitely makes more sense to outsource, rather than attempting to keep a designer on staff.

What’s your favorite solution for building offer creative? And before you tell me to simply go to Fiverr the next time you need graphics, I have to question why you might be willing to trust your reputation to someone who’s willing to do anything for $5?