Banner ads: where they run, what works, and how to get a full set

A banner ad is a fixed-size image, linked to a landing page, placed in an advertising slot that a publisher has reserved on their site. The publisher sells the slot, an ad server decides which advertiser fills it, and your image is delivered into it. That is the whole mechanism, and it has barely changed in thirty years — what changed is who does the selling and how the targeting works.

The important consequence is that the slot dimensions are not yours to choose. A publisher builds a 300×250 into their sidebar; if you do not have a 300×250, you do not appear there. This is why banner advertising is a set business rather than a single-asset business, and why advertisers who produce two sizes quietly buy a fraction of the reach they could have.

Static image banners are still the default currency. Animated HTML5 creatives exist and can perform well, but they need a different production route, they are rejected by a portion of inventory, and they are irrelevant for social feeds, Google Ads image assets and newsletters. For most small advertisers and affiliate programmes, a clean static set in PNG and JPG is what actually gets uploaded.

Four distinct channels, each with its own inventory, its own rules and its own required sizes. Most advertisers need at least two of them and end up producing for all four.

The table below lists the display and Google Ads formats — the two groups that matter for a display campaign. Five sizes cover most bookable inventory: 300×250, 728×90, 160×600, 320×50 and 320×100. Add 300×600 and 970×250 for the premium slots, and 336×280 and 468×60 to catch older placements.

Google Ads then needs a second kind of asset entirely. Responsive display ads and Performance Max campaigns combine your images with Google's own headlines, so they want pictures without embedded text at landscape 1200×628, square 1200×1200 and portrait 960×1200, plus logos at 300×300 and 1200×300. Supplying only fixed-size image ads leaves those campaign types with nothing to serve.

Click-through rates in display advertising are measured in fractions of a percent, and no creative trick changes that by an order of magnitude. What creative does change is whether the impressions you have already paid for do anything at all — and how much of your budget is wasted on placements you never filled because the size was missing.

The things that reliably matter are unglamorous. One message per banner, not three. A recognisable logo, because a large share of the value of display is that people saw your name. A button that looks like a button and says what happens next. Contrast high enough to read the headline at a glance on a phone in daylight. And a landing page that continues the promise the banner made — a banner advertising a discount that lands on a generic homepage burns the click.

Relevance beats polish. A banner showing the actual product with the actual price, in your actual brand colours, outperforms a generic stock-photo composition — which is precisely the argument for generating banners from your own website rather than from a template library. Rotation helps as well: the same creative shown repeatedly to the same audience loses response, so having three layout variants per format gives the ad server something to alternate.

Media is the obvious cost, but production is where small advertisers stall. A designer producing a set by hand works through each aspect ratio separately; an agency charges per format or per campaign, and the set gets redone every time the offer changes. The result is predictable: campaigns run with two sizes and an out-of-date price.

myfeedr prices the production side as one payment from 79 € with no subscription — starting with the most-used sizes and stacking up through the full IAB and Google Ads range, the social formats and the newsletter formats. Analysing your website and seeing watermarked previews of the whole set costs nothing, so the decision is made against real output rather than a sample. Prices are final; as a German small business under § 19 UStG no VAT is added.

Enter your website address. myfeedr loads the page and reads the logo file, the colour values, the font families, the headline, product names, prices and images, then generates 38 formats in one pass — about two minutes, no account needed to look. Layouts are chosen per aspect ratio, type sizes are computed from the box and your actual text, and the JPG variants are compressed to stay under the 150 KB display limit.

After unlocking, everything stays editable: headline and button copy, colours, the product or hero image with crop and zoom, and three layout variants per format, as often as you like. The download is a ZIP with PNG and JPG in every size plus 2× retina versions, and a separate Google Ads pack with the responsive assets. Upload the ZIP contents to Google Ads, hand the display sizes to your affiliate network, and the campaign has a complete set instead of two lonely rectangles.