9 banner ad examples, and how a small business can make ads and banners that work

A banner ad is an image ad that appears on a site you don't own, across the top of the page, down the side, or between paragraphs, and it takes anyone who clicks it to your website (Amazon Ads). The very first one ran on Hotwired in October 1994. It was built for AT&T, said "Have you clicked here? You will.", and led to a page of links to museums like the Louvre rather than to anything AT&T sold. Its makers recall a 44 percent click-through rate, though few people saw it (Digiday).

Banners don't get clicks like that anymore. WordStream and LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from 7,074 display campaigns run by LocaliQ customers, put the typical click-through rate at 0.12 percent for restaurants and 0.40 percent for education businesses at the top of the range (WordStream). That's one or two clicks for every thousand people who see the ad.

The reason is well documented. Nielsen Norman Group has found in studies going back to 1997 that people "almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement" (Nielsen Norman Group). In its 2018 study, 26 participants read the articles in front of them and barely glanced at the banners at the top of the page or in the right column (Nielsen Norman Group). Large ads in the middle of a phone screen were the exception, because they take up so much of the screen that people's eyes land on them anyway.

So banners still work, but they work at a narrower job than most example lists suggest. A banner reminds people who already know you that you exist, and it catches the small share of strangers for whom your message is exactly relevant. Greg Carter, marketing vice president at Clutch, puts the first part plainly: "Most people aren't going to immediately click a display ad. They'll come back to your site directly, weeks or months later, when they need you" (WordStream).

That's also why clicks are the wrong scorecard. MarketingExperiments tested two banners for a credit card that came with a $50 gift card. The cleaner, brighter version made it obvious the click led to a credit card application, and it lost 35 percent of the clicks. It also brought in more applications per day, because it stopped attracting people who only wanted the gift card (MarketingExperiments). The goal, as the author puts it, is to "attract the right clicks."

The nine examples below are grouped by the job each banner does. The first two reach people who already know you, which is where a small budget goes furthest. The next five give a stranger a reason to stop. The last two are banners on your own website, which cost nothing to run and get ignored for the same reasons paid banners do.

These banners follow people who visited your site or opened your emails. The audience is small, but it's the one audience that doesn't need convincing that you're real.

A retargeting banner shows your ad to people who have already been to your site, on the other sites and apps they visit afterward. Google calls this remarketing (Google Ads Help). It suits a small business because the audience already showed interest, so the banner only has to bring them back.

Chris Daley runs 1250Ships.com by himself, selling miniature ship models out of his garage in Southern California. He already emailed his customers at least twice a month, but as he puts it, "Sometimes email isn't enough for your customers to remember you exist." According to Mailchimp, whose remarketing tool he used, his retargeting ad brought in more than $8,200 in revenue and 19 first-time buyers in its first three months (Mailchimp). Mailchimp doesn't say what he spent.

His design choices are the useful part:

• He believes "the image is what really draws people more than the copy," so each ad shows a single ship.
• He crops his photos so the ship fills the frame, because "there isn't a lot of room."
• He found that photos with dark backgrounds did better for him than plain white ones.
• The ad sends people to his "New Releases" or "Bestsellers" section rather than one product page, so they browse and he doesn't sell out of a model he has few of.

A dynamic banner builds itself from your product list, so each person sees the items they viewed, with the current price, instead of one banner you designed by hand. On Google this is dynamic remarketing. You upload a basic spreadsheet of your products with an ID, price, and image for each, add Google's tag to your site, and Google picks which products to show each visitor (Google Ads Help). Meta's version, Advantage+ catalog ads, works the same way on Facebook and Instagram and recommends leaving out people who just bought (Meta Business Help Center).

The same approach can find new buyers too. Zahradnictví Kruh, a Czech garden e-shop, ran dynamic banners on Seznam's Sklik network to people interested in gardening, with a separate template for each of three product categories in that section's colors. Across its whole account, at the same budget, conversions rose 26 percent year on year, and the banners added more than 1,300 new people a week to its retargeting audience (Seznam.cz). Seznam sells the format, and the comparison covers the whole account rather than the banners alone, but the pattern is a sound one: cheap reach that feeds the retargeting that converts.

A stranger scrolling past your banner gives it a fraction of a second. These five patterns work because they put one concrete thing in front of that person, instead of a slogan.

A pain-point banner names a problem the viewer has right now, which is the fastest way to earn a second look. WordStream's collection of banner examples points to an AutoZone banner about the check engine light, which added the address and hours of the nearest store (WordStream). The problem gets attention, and the local detail tells the viewer exactly what to do about it.

The best evidence for this pattern comes from feed ads rather than display banners, but the lesson carries over. StorageAds tested six headlines for a self-storage facility's climate-controlled units on Meta, with the same image, audience, and landing page for each. "Your Stuff Deserves Better Than a Hot Garage" got a 4.2 percent click-through rate and 22 leads at $9.09 each. "Climate-Controlled Storage Starting at $129/mo" got 2.4 percent and 11 leads at $18.18 each (StorageAds). The lead counts are small, but the gap is wide: people scrolling past an ad respond to their problem before they respond to your price.

A specific number makes a claim believable in the half second a banner gets. Liberty Mutual's banner didn't say "you could save money." It said "We'll do the work while you save money" and gave a figure of $782. Amazon Web Services didn't claim to be more reliable. It said it had 7 times fewer downtime hours in 2018 than its closest competitor (WordStream).

A small business has numbers like these too: the hours a service saves, the price of the starter package, the number of five-star reviews, the year you opened. Pick the one a customer would repeat to a friend, make it the biggest thing on the banner, and make sure it's true.

A side-by-side banner shows the old way next to your way, so the viewer understands the value without reading. WordStream highlights Ridge, which pictured a bulky wallet beside its slim one, and Apple, which set its no-fee credit card against cards full of fees and added the call to action "Apply in minutes" (WordStream). Its author's test is a good one: if a comparison image could replace your copy, use the image.

This pattern suits any business whose product replaces something worse. A cleaning service can show a before and after. A bookkeeper can show a shoebox of receipts beside one tidy report.

A banner reaches people early, before most of them are ready to pay, so the best ask is often something free and small. Invisalign's banner offered a free smile assessment quiz, and DocuSign's offered an ebook on "six overlooked strategies that deliver rapid growth." WordStream's author makes the point directly: banner audiences sit at the top of the funnel, and very few are ready to take any action that involves payment (WordStream).

For a small business, the free step might be a quote calculator, a sample, a 15-minute consultation, or a short guide. It turns a click into a name and email address you can follow up with, which is worth far more than a visit.

A dated offer gives the viewer a reason to act now rather than later. Hulu's banner said "Limited-Time Offer" and showed the old price crossed out. USA Today's showed how many hours were left and used the call to action "Go Ad-Free," which names what the reader gets rather than what they have to do (WordStream).

Inspired Swim, a private swim-lesson company, ran a $100 Black Friday discount on winter lessons with the code BLACKFRIDAY. The responsive display campaign targeted parents in Alberta and British Columbia, ran for seven days, cost about $1,012, and drew 326,133 impressions and 5,107 clicks, at an average of $0.20 a click (Shoptoit Partners). The case study comes from the company that built the campaign tool, and it reports no bookings. It does show what a real offer, a real deadline, and a modest budget buy in reach.

Offers only work when they're real. Google's own guidance tells advertisers to include prices, promotions, and discount codes in their display ads, and to make the landing page lead straight to the promotion the ad mentions (Google Ads Help).

Some banners work because they lead with something interesting rather than with the sale. That was the idea behind the first banner in 1994: AT&T and Hotwired wanted ads to "give something back," so the click led to a page of great museum websites (Digiday).

The Economist used the same idea at scale. Its team pulled the most provocative articles from recent issues and turned each into a display ad that spoke directly to the viewer. A click opened the article itself, and only then asked the reader to register and subscribe. The campaign entry reports 1,500 directly trackable new subscriptions and an incremental 8,000 over its usual base (Shorty Awards). Those are the publisher's own figures from an award entry. Still, the pattern fits any business with real expertise: a banner that opens your most useful article or guide earns attention a sales pitch doesn't.

Your own site has banners too, usually an announcement bar across the top and a large hero image under the menu. They cost nothing to run, but visitors skip them for the same reasons they skip paid banners.

An announcement bar is the thin strip across the top of a store that carries one short message, such as free shipping, a sale, or a new gift card. On Shopify, a theme can hold one announcement bar with up to 12 messages, which either rotate on their own or wait for the visitor to click through them (Shopify Help Center). Gymshark's bar, for example, rotates through 10 percent off for email sign-ups, its sale, free delivery over £50, a student discount, and £10 for referring a friend (Zbang).

Keep your website banners still unless the visitor asks them to move. In a Nielsen Norman Group usability session, a shopper asked to find washing machine deals on the Siemens UK homepage gave up, even though the largest thing on the page was an offer of £100 off. The offer sat in a box that rotated every five seconds, so it was visible only 20 percent of the time. "I didn't have time to read it. It keeps flashing too quickly," she said (Nielsen Norman Group). Jakob Nielsen's rule is that a carousel should show a new panel only when the user asks for it.

The hero banner works the same way. Squarespace describes it as a large header image with a headline and a call to action near the menu, and suggests testing a new image if people leave the page quickly or don't click the button (Squarespace). Lead with your single most important message, and put the rest further down the page.

The table shows who each banner type reaches and what it asks of them.

The size question depends on which of two kinds of display ad you make. Google says its Display campaigns use two types: responsive display ads, which are the default, and image ads you design and upload yourself (Google Ads Help).

With a responsive display ad, you don't design a finished banner at all. You upload photos, a logo, a few headlines, and descriptions, and Google arranges them to fit almost any ad space on the network (Google Ads Help). Google needs at least one horizontal image and one square image, and accepts up to 15 (Google Ads Help). This is the practical choice for most small businesses, because one set of materials covers every size.

The trade is control. Google combines the pieces without a person checking each result, which is why its guidance warns that "special care is required during setup." Leave text, logos, and button graphics off your photos, because overlaid text becomes unreadable at small sizes and repeats the headline Google places beside it (Google Ads Help). The words belong in the headline and description fields.

With an uploaded image ad, you design the whole banner, words included, at fixed pixel sizes. Each file can be a JPG, PNG, or GIF of up to 150 KB (Google Ads Help). Google lists these as the common sizes:

Google's guide for the publishers who sell this ad space names 300 x 250, 336 x 280, 728 x 90, 300 x 600, and 320 x 100 as the sizes that perform best. It says the 300 x 250 does well inside or at the end of articles, the 728 x 90 above the main content, the 160 x 600 along sidebars, and the 320 x 50 at the bottom of a phone screen (Google AdSense Help). If you only make a few, start with 300 x 250, 728 x 90, 300 x 600, and 320 x 50, and upload a responsive ad alongside them. Google suggests exactly that, so your ad can still appear in spaces your custom banners don't fit (Google Ads Help).

A banner that works says one thing clearly, shows something real, and tells the truth about what happens after the click. These habits come straight from the examples above and from Google's own guidance:

• Write a headline that describes the product. Google's good example is "Our new wool socks are warm and cozy." Its bad example is "Click here to learn more." Use sentence case, not all capitals (Google Ads Help).
• Put the offer in the ad. Prices, discounts, and promo codes give a viewer a reason to stop, as long as they're real.
• Use a real photograph. Google advises against collages and plain white backgrounds and prefers photos with a physical setting. In a Taboola study of more than 500 million ad impressions, large, clear human faces were linked to higher engagement (PPC Land).
• Keep the words short. On an uploaded banner, you need your logo, the offer, and a call to action. BannerBoo suggests no more than four lines of text and nothing smaller than 10-point type (BannerBoo).
• Make the banner honest about what's behind it. Fake "play" or "close" buttons break Google's ad policy, and the credit card test above showed that a banner which makes its destination clear brings fewer clicks and better ones.
• Make three or four versions. Google recommends three to four ads per ad group, each with a different message and image, and it shows the better performers more often (Google Ads Help).

A banner should open a page that repeats its promise, with the same offer, the same product, and the same words. Google's guidance is concrete about this: if the ad says "Call us," the page needs your phone number, and if it says "Limited time offer," the page should lead directly to that promotion (Google Ads Help).

Even large brands get this wrong. When Zbang reviewed Gymshark's live ads in September 2026, it found that most sale ads opened the matching sale pages and an ad for one line of leggings opened a page led by those leggings. It also found eight ads offering 10 percent off with the code WELCOME10, a code that appears nowhere on the pages they link to (Zbang). An Unbounce review of 300 paid ads, cited by Moz, found that 98 percent didn't match their landing pages (Moz).

The fix is simple to describe. Write the banner and its page together, and before the campaign starts, click every ad and check that the headline, the image, and any code show up on the page it opens.

Banner ads are usually priced per thousand impressions, often written CPM, or per click (Amazon Ads). In WordStream and LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks, the typical display click cost $1.65 for education businesses and $5.58 for beauty and personal care, the most expensive category. The typical cost of a lead ran from $65.37 for home improvement to $230.44 for arts and entertainment (WordStream). Those figures cover several display formats, not banners alone, but they're the most current by-industry numbers available.

Treat a click-through rate that looks too good with suspicion. AI Digital, which sells ad-buying tools, argues that a display rate of 2 percent or more usually points to bots or bad placements rather than a great ad (AI Digital). Google shows Display ads inside mobile apps by default whenever the app matches your targeting (Google Ads Help), and agencies that audit these accounts describe banners in mobile games drawing taps from players trying to close them (Creekside Marketing).

Three settings keep a small budget pointed at real people:

• Exclude app categories that could never be your buyer. Games and similar categories can be switched off in your account's content suitability settings, which apply to Display, Demand Gen, and Performance Max campaigns (Creekside Marketing).
• Check where your ads showed every week. Google's "Where ads showed" report lists the sites and apps that carried your ads, and you can exclude the bad ones from the whole account (ads.expert).
• Give the campaign time before you judge it. Google says a new Display campaign spends five to seven days learning, and advises waiting at least 7 to 14 days before judging results (Google Ads Help).

On a small budget, start with retargeting. It reaches the people most likely to buy, it needs far fewer impressions than finding strangers, and it's where a one-person shop like 1250Ships.com found its return.

You can make banners with a design tool, with the ad platform's own generator, or with an AI marketer that also writes the copy and builds the page the banner opens. The right choice depends on how much of the work around the banner you want handled.

Kite is an AI marketer in your Slack. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. For banner ads, that means it handles the work on both sides of the click, not only the image.

Before it writes anything, Kite can pull the ads your competitors are running now, including their copy, images, landing pages, and how long each has been live. It writes ad copy from your customers' own words, such as reviews, testimonials, and comments, so the headline says what a buyer would actually say. It designs ad images in your brand's colors, fonts, and logo, and you can hand it your own product photos to work from.

Then it builds the landing page the banner opens, around one call to action and in the same brand. On pages Kite hosts, it tracks where visitors came from and which ones filled in the form, and it can split traffic between two versions of the page to find out which converts better. It asks before it publishes a page or launches a test. You upload the finished banners and launch the campaign in Google Ads yourself, and when you connect a LinkedIn Ads account, Kite prepares image ads there as drafts for an admin to launch. Kite has a free plan, and the Growth plan costs $100 a month with $100 in AI credits included. The sales funnel use case shows how Kite builds and measures the pages behind an ad.

Google's own tools cost nothing beyond your ad spend. Responsive display ads handle every size for you, and Asset Studio inside Google Ads generates the materials from a prompt. Give it a description of your audience and goal, up to five product images, and up to two PDF briefs, and it returns 15 images in several shapes, 9 headlines, 9 long headlines, and 9 descriptions to edit (Google Ads Help). Prompts currently work only in English.

Advertisers' early reports are mixed. In a June 2026 Reddit thread, one advertiser called Asset Studio "unusable," and an agency owner said it has improved but still fails "on a regular basis" (Reddit r/PPC). Google's tools also stop at the ad. The landing page and the measurement of what happens on it are yours to handle.

Canva is a general design tool with millions of templates, including banner templates, and its paid plans can resize a design into other formats. The free plan includes AI ad creation through Canva Grow with up to 20 AI uses a month, and Pro costs $144 a year for one person (Canva). Canva is the easiest way to design fixed-size banners yourself. You still write the copy, choose the message, and build the landing page.

The Brief, formerly Creatopy, is built specifically for ads. Its Pro plan costs $29 a month billed yearly and includes AI image and copy generation, resizing, and exports to JPG, PNG, GIF, and HTML5. The Ultra plan, at $79 a month billed yearly, adds ad serving, publishing straight to Meta and Google Ads, and automated A/B testing (The Brief). It suits a business that makes many banner sizes and versions and wants them organized in one place.

AdCreative.ai generates finished ad images from your brand details and scores them. Its Starter plan costs $39 a month for 10 downloadable creatives, and its free trial takes a card and becomes a paid plan unless you cancel (adtestbench). One reviewer who made 46 ads with it over three months found that 35 percent needed no edits and 15 percent were unusable, and that its website scan pulled wrong brand information about 40 percent of the time (BoostStash). He called it "a tactical execution tool, not a strategic thinking partner."

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