Best Practices

General

• The best PointRoll ads are thought of as one complete experience, not a standard online banner with panels 'attached' to it as an afterthought. This carries through to creative and implementation regarding the ad's layout and functionality.
• Ad content should be focused around one maximized objective, not multiple fragmented objectives that may ask too much of a user or dilute the overall goal.
• Two to four panels grab the best results, more than four minimizes user-interaction quality time.
• Successful PointRoll ads have more than just "Click Here" in the panels, including engaging content such as videos, interactives, data capture and more.
• PointRoll ads should be focused, goal-driven small interactions of selected content, not entire web sites. PointRoll ads are still ads, and are seen in the process of users browsing on the internet for entirely different content. Once a user's attention is distracted from their original purpose by an interesting advertisement, maximizing the experience a selected user will now have with the advertisement is key.

Banner (Main Creative)

• Delineated borders/boundaries on banners help the ad to separate itself from the content of the site it is appearing on. This concept can be especially inviting when the defining aspects of the banner carry through to the panel, assembling a seamless larger creative when the panel(s) is expanded.
• Banner hot spots should figure prominently into banner creative, in fact be part of it from the concept stage, instead of being "added on later". Design can influence a user's behavior, and the more prominent the hot spots figure into the creative, the higher chance a banner has of a user interacting with it.
• In addition, in an animated banner the "Roll Over" message and hot spots should appear early in the animation, not be left to animate in at the end. In most cases leaving this element to come in at the end doesn't give users the best chance of noticing it.
• On horizontal banners, hot spots should appear adjacent to each other, not on top of one another. On vertical banners, the hot spots should appear on top of one another, not adjacently. In both cases, doing it incorrectly inhibits the user′s ability to navigate between panels.

Panels

• All panels should have a clear call-to-action(s), like "Click Here!" or "Enter Your Information Below", etc. Drawing user's attention to your goals will make the most of the time users spend, and ultimately will positively effect the ad's performance overall.
• Panels always need some activity the user needs to perform, i.e. Click, Fill Out, View, etc. The goal of any panel should be to lead the user along to continue the experience they've begun.
• Borders/boundaries designed into panels help them stand out from the clutter of the web site they are based on. This can be especially powerful when those elements are carried over from the banner creative.
• If a panel requires the user to do something other than click, the required action should be minimal enough that a user is almost guaranteed to complete it. If a filling out a form is the goal, required fields shouldn't be much more than name/email/city/state/zip. If there is a questionnaire, keep the questions short, simple and few.
• On HTML panels, individual images sizes should be no larger than 8k. For a dimensionally large design element, (i.e. photograph, logo treatment, etc), this may mean slicing that element into small optimized pieces. Low image k weights ensure that when a user initiates a panel in a PointRoll ad they start seeing that panel content immediately.
• AutoDisplay ads where there is a seamless transition between the AutoDisplay panel and the banner (i.e. a visual element goes from the AutoDisplay "into" the banner) require a common design element - one edge of both AutoDisplay panel and banner must be shared. This is how the files know how to line up in Designer when stitched together. Designer will allow you to push a panel either left/right or up/down, but not both.

Technical

• PointRoll ads are accepted/rejected largely based on their initial load, or the amount of information a user is required to automatically download to see a PointRoll ad when they visit a web site with a PointRoll ad on one of it's pages. For PointRoll, this initial load is a simple formula of adding the banner file size, the total panel code size, and five additional k for PointRoll's proprietary technology (B + pC + 5). Banner size is easily controlled, and following PointRoll's specs for banner file size will keep the ad on the right track. However, HTML code at best is a greatly varying language, and can be effected by many agents including, but not exclusive to the experience level of the person producing it and an authoring tool being used to create it. While these methods are acceptable for building web sites, PointRoll ads require much simpler, cleaner lines of code. Simple and clean keeps unnecessary code out, and less code means a smaller initial load. Below are some tips for keeping code clean and small.
• Use in-line style tags to control the attributes of your fonts/inputs. Do not rely on the authoring tool defaults of "size=1" type tags. Typical tags look like:
  <font style='font:bold italic 10pt Arial'>
  <font style='font:bold 10pt Arial'>
  <font style='font:10pt Arial;color:#404040'>
• Only nest tables as necessary. Overly nesting tables adds to the panel code greatly and often is completely unnecessary. If you are doing it with three nested tables, chances are you can do it with two.