How Your Banner Ads can Drive Social Media Traffic

Why your banner ads are great for Inbound Marketing?

I’m often annoyed by the fact that clients’ ad banners on my blogs shown as the first (often as the only) image when you share your post on social media. Sure, I agree to display their banners, but that doesn’t mean it should appear in places it shouldn’t.

For example, when you paste an URL on Facebook status update, you will automatically be recommended an image/ images to choose, title and description. You can opt not to use those, but typically people are sharing a link as it is.

Not only on Facebook, that is also the case when you share using Pinterest and some other social media, such as Chime.in

Notice the ad banners placed as prominent as the real image you want to share!

Less visible, but people tend to click on the arrow to find other images – and there you go… more banner ad!

Ditto with Facebook…

And Ditto with Chime.in…

Light bulb *ding* moment!

Then it hits me. What if your ad is well-designed in such a way that people don’t mind yours get in the way? Let’s just think this like Reddit Ads. If you often visit Reddit.com, then on the right sidebar you’ll see Reddit ad with “Reddit this Ad” feature.

The ads displayed over there is quite interesting, and people DO “reddit” (read: share) them.

Here’s the idea: If you advertise on a well-visited blog, then in addition to the impressions and clicks your banner ad you could get traffic from your banner ad shared on social media.

Virtually any social sites you share your link to will have a chance for the banner to be grabbed automatically.

When your banner ad is well-designed and not too salesy, it will caught the social sharers’ eyes or even automatically added by the system. Your banner carries your message across the socialsphere, and THAT can create brand awareness and drive traffic.

Like this one:

Some ideas…

Advertise on popular blogs, which don’t use images in their blog posts

Some great blogs, such as Labnol.org has minimal amount of images simply because it rocks even without the eye candies. But getting your banner ad on such blogs will make yours stand out. Better yet, when a visitor shares a blog post on his social media account, chances are, your banner ad images will be displayed as the post image.

Place your banner ad on top of any images on a blog

This is code wise – so if you are advertising on a blog with a left sidebar, then you might want to focus on having your banner ad on that left sidebar, even though yours located below any images in the main section. Why? Because HTML-wise, the left sidebar is typically coded first, then the main content section.

This means that everything inside the left sidebar – including your banner ad – is actually located above the main content section, and will typically grabbed first when shared on social site. Cool, eh?

Takeaway

Please bear in mind that I’ve never personally track whether this will drive significant traffic or not, but as your intention is to get impressions, clicks and awareness when you place your banner on other sites, it doesn’t hurt to get extra trickle of traffic from the social media.

What do you think? Share your thought by leaving your comment on this blog post.