AudioGO Gets Serious About Display Ads

4 min read

Display banners are a great visual companion for your audio ads, and they've always been part of AudioGO's normal offering. And in our latest release, we've made some serious investments to not only make it easier to upload display banners to your campaign - but we even went so far to include a feature that also creates them. In fact, it's so easy to upload and create a banner now that our new motto should be "no campaign without a banner ad!"

A New Way to Upload Your Banners

While we continue to support the same banner formats, there's no need to worry about the exact size of your banners anymore. As long as the image meets the minimum specs (see below), you're good to go: just choose the file you want to use from your computer, select the area that you want to be displayed, and hit 'Save.' Our system will do all the work of cropping and resizing the banner to the right size and format behind the scenes.

You can still upload up to three banner sizes, and we strongly recommend you do so in order to ensure your banners appear across all compatible desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Moreover, while you do need to pay for your audio impressions, there is NO charge for the banner display impressions that run alongside your audio ads.

Supported Banner Sizes and Formats

  • Rectangle banner: also known as a 'medium rectangle' in the display world, this is one of the most common banner formats and it's the one that will likely get you the most impressions. If you can only upload one banner, make sure to add this format. Minimum size requirements for this banner type are 300 pixels in width by 250 pixels in height.
  • Square banner: this format is more common across mobile devices. If you don't upload a square banner, some players will default to the rectangle format, but for best mobile coverage we recommend uploading both. Minimum requirements for a square banner are 500 by 500 pixels.
  • Vertical banner: this is yet another common format across the IAB standards, and we recommend adding this one to be displayed to the side of some web or desktop-based players. Minimum requirements for this size are 300 pixels in width by 600 pixels in height.

For each banner type we support either JPEG, PNG or GIF formats. Please note that at the time of this writing, animated GIFs are not supported.

When it comes to absolute maximum supported resolution and file size, please ensure that the images you upload do not exceed 6,000 by 6,000 pixels, nor 20MB in file size.

Creating Your Banners Online

If you don't have a banner ad made, not to worry. Because thanks to our new integration with Canva - a leading online graphic design platform - you can create one (or all three) yourself within the AudioGO app via our display ad creation tool. And with thousands of templates to choose from, along with an easy drag-and-drop interface, you don't need to be a designer or an ad specialist to create professional-grade banners ads.

You can actually learn more about it here in this post. Which we highly recommend you read as there's some information in there that you're not going to want to miss.

Why Are Display Banners Important

Display banners are a very effective way to consolidate your brand messaging at both the audio and visual levels - which has the effect of making your ad campaigns even more compelling on an emotional level. Also, by using display banners you're allowing interested listeners to interact with your ad with a click - helping with immediate conversion, website or landing page visits, or even social media engagements. Things that we can track and report as click counts and CTR values in your dashboard.

Please also note that NOT all devices are compatible with display ads, and/or depending on the activity of the listener, they may not always see your banner even if you have one. For example, someone cooking while listening on a screen-less smart speaker will hear you ad but they won't be able to see your banner. Similarly, someone driving or jogging with the phone in their pocket will not be able to see your display ad even though that particular device may be compatible. And it's because of this that you might find less clicks or display impressions with your audio campaign than you would otherwise with a pure display one.

Is Canva Free or Paid?

While many of the graphics on Canva are available for free, you do have the option to purchase premium assets or even subscribe to paid Canva plans if you're wanting for more. Just note that any payments you make to Canva is purely between you and them - and it is in no way affiliated with AudioGO.

You can read more about our new Canva integration here in this post.