The first and foremost challenge that you face in designing an app banner is small screens of the mobile. The window of opportunity is shorter and the attention span of the users is very less.

In just a split second, you have to grab the attention of the users so that they are attracted towards your banner ad and oblige to click on it. However, designing mobile banner ads for an app is not an easy task.

Hence one has to make sure that app banner ads are designed properly and below are some of the rules that need to be kept in mind while designing them.

Important Questions to Ask

Before designing an app banner, you need to clear some concepts that will help you design the banners in a better way. These questions are stated below.

• What are you selling?
• How will you stand out your brand from other similar brands?
• How will you express your message with strong call to action in both in visual and in the copy?

In short, before you design the banner ad, you should be clear about how you are going to grab the attention of the user so that they click on your banner. Is it just the visuals or is it the copy too, or both combined together? Once you are clear about these things, go ahead.

1. Create a List of App Ad Sizes

Before you start your app ad banner design, create a list of the sizes in which you are going to design. It will clear your mindset about design. Below are the most popular sizes of app banners:
120×20, 168×28, 216×36, 300×48, 320×50, 468×60, 728×90, 320X250, 320X480, 120X600, 800×1280, 768×1024

2. Make Your Copy Simple and Crisp

Keep copy simple but creative with uncluttered visuals. In the message part of the banner ad, try to keep the message simple and uncomplicated. You may craft a carefully and clever message, but at the end, it is the end users who are going to comprehend that message through their own prism of understanding. So you have to craft your message keeping them in mind.

Magic Bricks uses simple and a clear copy to get its message across to the viewers.

3. Give an Impactful Heading

Giving a strong/impactful heading will give muscle to your app ad banner. It will help you attract the immediate attention of your viewers and draw their curiosity towards your banner. Clear, strong and concise heading engage the users. They come to know immediately what the banner is all about.

It’s important that heading must be supported well by good fonts and better color combo so that they can make the heading stand out from the banner.

The attractive heading in the below app banner gets the viewers hooked.

4. Convey Message Using Powerful Words

You should use powerful words to give that zing to your message but you should remember not to go overboard with too many powerful words.

The key to balance is to keep in mind the rule that use words that have an high emotional appeal as per your audience tastes and don’t leave that sphere of influence.

Best example of how using powerful words can make an app banner attractive.

5. Leverage The Image Benefits in Banner

Use visual content to build up your banner along with your copy. However, you have to keep in mind that use that kind of images that are consistent with your brand and product.

Relevance is very important for the image that you are using in your banner ad. Also, a relevant image would help you to grab the attention of the viewers and will help you stand out from competition. To grab the short attention span of your viewers for a longer time, you need to employ such images that are eye catching and not too gaudy.

Use of a beautiful image enhances the below app ad banner.

6. Use Emotions. It Appeals The Most!

Everyone has the ability to read facial expressions and it is conveying a lot of information by appealing to our emotions. So, you should think about using faces and persons in your app banner ads.

Use emotional pictures that are able to grab the attention of the user. Also, you can use some famous face that is recognized far and wide as your brand ambassador. If that is out of your budget, don’t worry.

The other way is to find out how your buyer persona should look like and find some good stock imagery according to that criteria.

The emotions of the characters in this app ad banner make it more clickable.

7. Relate It to Your Target Audience

Normally, there is only a singular goal for your banners ads in an app. ie. to get maximum downloads or visit to your app landing page . Therefore, choose the right kind of audience that is apt for the kind of app you have developed.

So, design your banner ad as per the tastes and requirements of your target audience. Hence, all the elements of your banner ad, right from design to colors to text should be finalized keeping in mind your target audience.

Thus, if you have identified your target audience correctly and designed the banner ads as per their likings and expectations, you are likely to get a higher campaign ROI.

The below app ad banner communicates clearly with its target audience.

8. Choose Less Cluttered Background

Background of your banner also plays an important role because it affects the visibility of your banner. That’s why your banner background should be neat and clean.

Keep in mind the points below:

• The background must not merge with the text and logo.
• It must have less colors.
• The banner must have easily standout text.

The uncluttered background of this Angry Birds app ad banner makes it more beautiful.

9. Optimize File Size Smartly

It is highly recommended that you should keep the file size for a banner ad in the range of 5KB to 200KB, which also depends on the size of the banner. But the best would be if you could keep your banner file size under 100KB, to incorporate it easily in any platform. The smaller the file size , the better your banner will load.

You should keep in mind the fact that by adding multiple colors, images, text and animations, the banner size can quickly go up. If the banner image size is too high, it will take time to load and this may prove to be fatal for your banner campaign.

It’s better to keep banner size the smaller to make it load faster to grab your user’s attention in a timely fashion.

10. Use Interactive Banners

Research has shown that users are quickly attracted to animation and motion, and that is why interactive and animated app banner ads greatly outperform the static banners.

Hence, you should also try to incorporate some kind of animation in your banner ad. It may not be totally animated, but in order to get user’s attention quickly, it works better. you can use sliding, fading, blinking text and other motions. Don’t forget that using animations shall increase the file size of your banner, so plan accordingly.

The use of animations makes this app ad banner of Candy Cush Saga more clickable.

11. Don’t Overlook The Branding

Since branding goes in a long way in building trust amongst your viewers, you should not overlook this important part. You should remember that every element in your banner ad creates and contributes in a promise to your viewer and a potential customer. And each and every banner element contributes positively to the fulfillment of that promise and in the building of trust in your viewers.

Research has shown that up to 90% of judgement on a particular product can be based only on colors used in the branding of that particular product. So, you need to choose carefully the color of your banner ads. And how do you choose colors carefully? It is simple pick colors which are in your brand guidelines. Whether it is fonts or colors picking it from brand guidelines is the best exercise.

Logo is the replica of your brand. User know you by your logo. If the banner has your colors, fonts and even a name, user will not click on it. They feel suspicious about clicking on it. The logo at banner give them the belief that they are clicking at the faithful banner.

The branding colors and style of Oyo is clearly seen in the below app ad banner.

12. Give a Clear and Strong Call-to-action

The call to action button is an important element of your banner ad because ultimately it tells about your ad what to expect and what to do with your banner ad.

The button should be prominent and should use contrasting colors so that it stands out from the image and the copy of the banner ad. In order to have a high conversion rate, the right call to action button is quite an essential part of designing banners.

The clear and strong call to action makes this Google app ad banner more clickable for the users.