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Ask Me Anything How To Make Banners With High CTR

Anastasia AdCombo

Affiliate Manager
Affiliate Manager
AdCombo
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Do you really think that you should have Master of Arts Degree to generate juicy creative materials?
Lol, flat nonsense. You are in the battlefield, my friend. You'll never know if a certain creative materials will give you a sky-high ROI or a severe ban by Facebook moderators. Right now there is only one way to check up your creative materials - to TEST them.

Basically your testing strategy should look like this:​
STEP 1: Create 15-20 unique creative materials. Use different combinations of images and headlines for that is the best way to find the winning combo.
STEP 2: Run these creative materials for a couple of days to see which of them has/have highest CTR.
STEP 3: Finally select 1 or 2 creative materials with the highest click rate and it is basically done.


DISCLAIMER:
We are sure aware that using spy tools will be faster in most cases. However, we are not seeking any shortcuts since we want all tips for your attention to be backed with knowledge. Plus a good spy tool is rarely free, and we spare your expenses.



Some tips for making a good creative material.

To begin with, you should have some basic Photoshop skills. Otherwise, I would strongly recommend you to watch a couple of videos on youtube to understand what layers are and how to edit them.

As it was said above, unfortunately there is no ultimate formula for making a good creative material. But in most cases it should be:

1) Bright and interesting. Therefore, animated banners usually win over static banners. But don't push too hard. You don't want a banner to be flashing like a Christmas tree.
2) Contrast. Quieter colours in the background and brighter coloured fonts with call to action buttons are preferred.
3) Informative. If images contain text, remember that a short clear message works better than long complicated sentences in small hardly readable characters.
4) Inviting. Call to action buttons will definitely be a huge plus.
5) Positive. As it's known, banners with a positive message and overall positive attitude usually have higher CTR.
6) No misleading. If you will promise a fortune to everyone who clicked on your banner, it may produce a better CTR but your final conversion rate would be low as hell.
7) Credible. Appeal to an authority that people trust. For example, like: "Rated number one by pediatrics association".


Some banner examples:

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Before/ after teasers
Works pretty good since there is simple logic behind this: now I am fat and ugly like the person on the left. Then I will eat that diet chocolate bar and magically I am young and beautiful like the person on the right.
We also recommend using real people images rather than models. Because it can increase trust: If she was able to do it, then I also can.


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SEX banner teasers
Boobs will always attract clicks. Especially if you are promoting adult offers and males is your targeted audience. I think there's no need to explain why it works, but best explanation may be found in Sigmund Freud's books.


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Easy way to get rich banners
People like to believe that money grow up on trees. So, there are dozens of life hacks that promise to make anybody rich in no time.
At the moment I would recommend using crypto related images since that topic is really hot and trendy.


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WTF banners
The main objective here is to trigger people into asking a question and thus clicking on the image. The rule is the more incomprehensible picture, the better.


Where to look for images? (use it at your own risk due to copyright)
Here Google Images can be of great help, and you sure know that. So, below are some other sources for image hunting.

Alternatives to Google Images

Bing
Free Images - Pixabay
everystockphoto
Morguefile.com free photographs for commercial use
Links to interesting content updated hourly

Weird and funny pictures that can be used for teasers
Galleries - Freaking News Pictures

WARNING! Links to nudity and sexual content are below.
If you are promoting ADULT offers, you can use:
Rate My Ex Girlfriend - Rate My Girlfriend and Hot Girls with iPhones
!! gay shit !! -> Guys With iPhones

+1 LIFEHACK

Situation: You found a great picture for your creative material but it has watermarks on it. How to get rid of those watermarks?
Answer: Upload your picture with watermarks to the Google Images and hit the Search button. There is a good chance that in search results you'll find the same pictures but with no watermarks.

Where to buy images?
https://www.istockphoto.com – 33$ (11$ per credit)
https://depositphotos.com/ – 14.99$ (10 images/mo)
https://www.shutterstock.com/ – 29$ (10 images/mo)
Royalty Free Images Subscription, Vector Graphics and Stock Images | Stock Photo Secrets – 99$ for membership (0.49$ per image)
Welcome to Photocase. Unique stock photos since 2001. – 49$ (25 credits)

Juan's bonus case study
Juan lives in a Spanish coastal town called San Sebastian. During the summer and tourist season he works as a lifeguard, but in the winter apart from drinking there is nothing much to do. And since he recently dropped out of a college he had a lot of spare time but a little shortage of money. So, once he heard this magical phrase 'CPA marketing' and his life changed. Sounds familiar? Yeah, we've all been there :) He began eagerly exploring the topic and as a result - surprise, surprise - he ended up registered with AdCombo.

What next? He decided to run his first campaign on Facebook. A bit foolish from my point of view. Anyway, he chose Adcombo's most recent offer at the time - Diet Star (completely whitehat btw) with Spain as a GEO to run in. I think you guessed why Spain. Reason number 1, this is Juan's home country and he thought he understood the market pretty well. Reason number 2 - there is a highest payout for that offer - 18$. Ha-ha classic! Typical newbie's mistakes.

And what his creative materials looked like? Now, have a look:

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* written in Spanish: fat-free​

30 seconds into the campaign and BOOM! His account is banned! Why?

Look closer. Closer... Still nothing? Facebook moderators didn't like the word 'grasas' which in Spanish means fat. Such bans is common practice on Facebook and mature fellows know that. Usually after a few days of writing to Facebook Support your account will be eventually unbanned. Yet, this is not a nice way to start your CPA journey.
At the same time you'll be able to come across stories from CPA legends who managed to run a campaign on Facebook with dick pics as their creative materials. Basically, they are good at cloaking and their accounts usually have a high trust rate. But this is another story...

To conclude, my word of advice is - be really careful with your creatives materials, especially if you are a newbie in CPA marketing. And bear in mind, all technics that we discussed above remains just a theory. You should go out into the battlefield and TEST. This is the only way to verify if your creative materials are good or not.


Always yours,
AdCombo
 
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That is copyright theft -- you can be sued for that. You shouldn't post recommending stealing content or how to defeat a content owner's watermarking...

Yes, you are totally right with copyright. But I thought that this is obvious that images on Google images are mostly hosted on other sites and protected by copyright, so it wasn't necessary to mention it. However, after reading your comment I decided to edit my original post for everyone to get your point.
Thank you for noticing that.

Also it made me think, how many people legally purchase images for their creative materials. It will be interesting to make a poll.
 
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There are some people out there for whom 5$ for an image is too much. They prefer to take that risk with images protected by copyright. I am not saying that taking pictures from Google images is a right thing to do, but in this article I've tried to talk about alternatives to Google images. And thanks to your previous comment I've added a few royalty-free image stocks.
 
There are sites that offer images for free, with no restriction on use, nor require attribution. Unsplash has images of amazing quality and you can do whatever you want with them - use them on a personal blog, or commercially.

MorgueFile is another one. Some of their pics are good but a lot of them look to be people's vacation pics. :D

There are other sites that do that, too.

The only downside that I've found, is that those sites aren't set up with affiliates in mind, so sometimes, you can't find the category you want.
 
Most of the Internet is a pirate ship -- I know that. When a hungry man steals a loaf of bread, and I take half of it from him what does that make me? Eating stolen bread.

Good point!

I once used a video from YT's creative commons and they dinged me for it, even thought I got it from them. Apparently, the guy who put it in the CC section wasn't the original owner and I paid the price. I can be too trusting, sometimes. :D
 
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