Buying all of the display real estate on a high-traffic site is a great way to promote your brand. Of course, doing so could cost you over half a million dollars a day, but this doesn’t mean that businesses with more modest budgets can’t use Image Ads to their advantage. Take it from us: we just introduced support for Google Image Ads into version 2.0 of Clickable Pro, but we’ve been running our own Image campaign for over a year.

Image Ads differ from text ads in lots of ways. For example, you need more than a browser window to create one, and the bidding system is slightly different. (Google’s uses an “Effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions” or “eCPM” to place Image Ads, which we’ll review in an upcoming post.) But the goals of an Image Ad campaign are fundamentally similar to those of text campaigns: promoting your brand and producing conversions. (As it happens, Image Ads are a great way to do both things at the same time.) Moreover, you’ll want to apply many of the same best practices to your Image Ad campaigns: track conversions, set goals, test variations, and continuously optimize.

Let’s look at one of Clickable’s own ads as an example.

The first thing you’ll notice is the amount of text in this ad. In our experience, ads that make clear offers consistently outperform ones that are obscure and broad, no matter how impressive the graphics. This means that ad copy is key. The graphics are still important, but they have one primary function: grabbing a user’s attention, just like headlines in a text ad. Once you’ve gotten a user’s attention, you’ll only keep it if you make a clear, relevant and unique offer (as you would with your description line and users will only click on your ads if you tell them what to do next (as you would with your “call to action”.

Grabbing Attention and Promoting Brand Recognition
The first thing any ad needs to do is capture somebody’s attention, preferably a potential customer’s attention. With text ads, you do this by writing bold and keyword-rich headlines. This is always challenging, because you only have 25 characters to do it. With an Image Ad, you get 1000 words. Or, rather, you get the equivalent: a picture.

In the ad above, the image and design serve two functions: grabbing attention and promoting the Clickable brand. In an image 300 pixels wide and 250 pixels tall, we’ve managed to include a screenshot of our Dashboard, our logo, and our motto—all in our green and white color scheme. Even if our click-throughs are low, we can promote our brand to thousands of users in a relatively cheap way. But, our goal isn’t branding alone. We do want to drive traffic to our site, so we try holding on to our users’ attention with a clear offer.

Clearly Describing The Value Of Your Offer
One of our goals at Clickable is helping you spend less time on search marketing while making it more profitable. The copy in this particular ad indicates part of that goal: “Spend less time managing your search advertising.” If this matters to you, your next question will be, “What do I need to do next?”

Making a Call to Action
If you’ve gotten your users’ attention and communicated a valuable offer, you need to tell them what they should do next. You need to make the “call to action.” In this ad, we do this in two words, clearly set apart from the rest: “FREE TRIAL.” In other words, “Click here to try our product for free and see if it saves you time.” That should be clear enough.

Grab attention. Promote your brand. Describe your offer. Make the “call to action.” Image Ads are pretty similar to text ads after all.