There has been a significant surge seen in the mobile ads market over the last few years. These days everything goes on mobile, right from witnessing live streaming sports to posting on social networks, accessing bank accounts, buying and selling online, and more. Remember, those small advertising banners featuring on mobile apps. How do you design your mobile ads so that they stand out, and be profitable? Let us find out with these killer designing tips.
#1. Concise copy brings in an amazing amount of clarity
The ad copy should be short, simple, and clear, explaining the benefits of your app. Focusing on a unique selling proposition, enhances engagement post installation. Even if you have too many points to sell, avoid displaying them all, which might distract users.
#2. Powerful images do the trick, keeping simplicity intact
An easy to understand image is highly effective in allowing users to comprehend what you have got in store for them. Whether it is a mere screenshot of the actual product and service, or an image illustrating the benefits, if done in a creatively interactive manner, you are sure to drive more sales for your app.
Because of limited real estate on a mobile screen, you should be wise in selecting right images for that single most powerful image. Ensure that one single image should be able to convince users, and lure them to click the ad in order to open up the app. Keep it basic, yet strikingly innovative.
#3. Have your brand displayed on the ad
Brand identity is an amazing marketing tool that consistently uplifts brand recognition. Every new ad impression is likely to get yourself an ad click. People associate them with brands, and if they see the brand logo, they are more likely to check out the ad. This works great with eCommerce apps, wherein consumers shop on mobile devices more often than before. The trend keeps moving headstrong even this year, with no signs of slowing down whatsoever.
#4. Place a CTA to complete the mobile ad
CTAs act a source of bread and butter for every single marketer vouching for traffic. A mobile ad seems incomplete without a CTA. Moreover, people are more intrigued in checking out a CTA rather than the ad altogether. CTAs should be wisely placed within an ad, specifically with the limited space in hand.
It is ideal to place them on the right hand side of the ad, with the copy present on the left hand side. This will help users to first go through the copy, and then decide whether to click the CTA or not, based on the text present on the button. Good CTAs always aim at helping users instead of making them sign up for something. Of course, your main goal is to build a list of subscribers, but users should feel that they will be highly benefitted after clicking on the CTA.
The simplest way to decide text for your mobile ad CTA is keeping the text absolutely simple and abstract, like “Subscribe” or “Call Us”.
#5. Avoid placing unnecessary information occupying important space
A fine line separates insufficient information from excessive information. Lack of information leads users to ample misunderstandings, while excessive information uses up screen space. Ensure that important space is not occupied by detailed information having no purpose to serve with your mobiles ads.
#6. Remember how mobile users behave
A mobile ad cannot be compared with the ad you see on a website. Web users are not keen enough in checking out a website based ad in spite of a large banner size, due to the irrelevancy to their purpose. On the other hand, mobile users are targeted with mobile ads, not only similar to the apps in use, but also relevant to the users, in spite of a small banner size.
There is a hell of a lot of difference in how web users react to a website ad, compared to how mobile users react to a mobile ad. The sole purpose of web users is to simply seek out information, and they are not interested in checking what other websites have to offer. Mobile users are bound to try new apps whenever they come across one.
The reason being, they do not have to go to the application store for doing so, as ads appear with the Internet on. Since they are offered to check out similar apps, it is hard for them to resist without actually clicking on the ad, with the only condition that the ad banner should be attractive and engaging enough.
Videos or animations are a lot more effective than plain text. People are more eager to see an animated picture or a video, rather than merely reading out plain text. Most of them understand this. However, they do not realize that most mobile users are already listening to music while accessing apps and they only get interrupted with videos featuring sounds, or animated images with sound effects.
Herein, maintaining the silence is the key to success. The best way to deal with such a situation is creating videos or animated GIF(s) with muted sound. Hence, visuals impact user minds effectively without any kind of external sound disturbing their listening activity.
A mobile ad banner is surely small in size. However, ensure that the text or CTAs present on it are legible enough to read. Users should have no difficulty in reading out even brief lines of text, or what the CTAs say. Within that small banner size, the text size should be large enough to read.
Wrapping up with a few final thoughts
There is not much scope for showing novelty in your mobile app ads, due to limitations in the banner sizes. However, try to be creative even with that constraint. You can bring in innovation using factors like textual fonts, sizes, use of colors, peppy characters from your app or from an external source, etc. Ads with moderate colors deliver the best performance in terms of CTR, through a recent study conducted. The best practice is to use just 2-3 colors in the entire banner.
When it comes to mobile, banners occupying limited screen space are more effective in viewing, as compared to full-screen banners. This is due to the fact that users get highly irritated if full-screen ads occupy the entire screen space.
