Since the last article in the ‘A Complete Explanation Of PPC’ looked at the text advert which is used most on search results. As well as 
recognising that text adverts have been innovated upon in PPC introducing new elements such as more links, reviews and Google+, they are the back bone to PPC since the vast majority of pay per click campaigns out there use text adverts. However, there are two options when it comes to adverts in PPC: text adverts or image adverts. For this reason, here is an explanation of image adverts in PPC.
Image adverts are a way to advertise something in PPC through the means of an image. The great thing about image adverts is that there is a complete and utter level of freedom for advertisers. By this, the advertiser can choose what size image advert to use and the whole design of the image advert. Below are the sizes you can have image adverts in PPC:
- 728×90 Leaderboard
- 468×60 Banner
- 336×280 Large Rectangle
- 300×600 Wide Skyscraper
- 300×250 Medium Rectangle
- 250×250 Square
- 234×60 Half Banner
- 200×200 Small Square
- 180×150 Small Rectangle
- 160×600 Wide Skyscraper
- 125×125 Button
- 120×600 Skyscraper
This long list of potential image advert sizes should make clear the amount of customization there are for image adverts in PPC. For this reason, it has an upper hand to text adverts: image adverts generally gain the higher click through rate because they attract the web user much easily and have the potential to display much more information in an easy-to-read median. Remember that an image can be worth more than a hundred words.
The only problem that I feel is associated with image adverts is the fact that they can never be displayed on search results of search engines which only shows text adverts. Image adverts are displayed on publisher websites that run programs such as Google Adsense.
You might not think this is a problem. However, think about it. When you create a text advert, you know the traffic will be relevant because the only way a web user could have seen your text search advert is from searching for a phrase related to your advert’s contents in a search engine. Whereas, there are many many ways a traffic can gain traffic and some of these ways may not produce the most contextual traffic for your campaign like search engines results consistently does. You are not relying on Google search results to bring your advert relevant traffic now when using image adverts. You are now relying on the website you are advertising on that they have good quality content to attract highly contextual traffic.
Putting this one drawback aside, image adverts are a great addition to a PPC campaign if you create a good image advert. This is why it is important to know how to optimise an image advert.
