Create Banners Your Affiliates Want!

Banners are a fantastic way for your Affiliates to promote your Merchant program, in fact, they are the most common way Affiliates will promote you! Using Merchant banner ads on their site is a quick and easy way for prospective customers to click through to your website and drive sales.

You can make them big, small, vertical, horizontal; anything to catch their eye! We advise Merchants to always supply their Affiliates with as many options as possible, allowing them to find what fits for their site. In turn, they can present your program in the best light possible.

Common Banner Sizes

Below is a graphic depicting some of our most popular banner sizes that we suggest Merchants upload to ShareASale. You do NOT have to stick to these sizes, and can make a banner in any size you or an Affiliate wants!

Don’t be surprised if an Affiliate contacts you for a different sized banner. Take advantage of this opportunity to design a custom-sized creative for them. This simple act will go a long way towards relationship building between you (as a program manager), the brand and the Affiliate. All this could really help your reputation, hopefully adding to the number of new applications to your program.

Banner Types

There are many different banner creative categories, such as traditional, product, category, holiday, seasonal, deep-linked, and more. We’ll focus on some of these with Merchant examples to give you an idea of how to prepare specific banners that will appeal to multiple types of Affiliates.

1. Traditional Banners

Typically, these are simple banners with either the Merchant company name or logo. Sometimes they will include additional information about the brand or an image in the background. These banners direct the Affiliate to the homepage of the Merchant’s website.

PRO TIP: Don’t forget your Merchant Search Page Logo!

When Affiliates search for Merchants, they will sometimes see a small brand logo under the Merchants name, like so:

To add this image to your account, go to the Internal Logo Files page under the “My Account” tab. From here, choose the Search Results Logo (88×31 option) and upload the image. Your brand’s logo and Merchant name will now appear side-by-side, giving your brand a little extra exposure during an Affiliate’s search for new partners.

2. Category-Focused Banners

If the Merchant website has niche product categories and if creative assets exist that highlight these individual sections, this might be a great option to use! Build banners around the most popular categories specific to your Merchant site.

The banners above come from Fanatics.com, and both banners focus a different major category in their product line. While their full website covers a variety of sports teams, they’ve created niche, category focused banners – in this case, pro baseball for the World Series and World Baseball Classic. Affiliates promoting sports could use either of these targeted banners to appeal to their audience and promote the Merchant at the same time.

3. Seasonal and Holiday Banners

Many Merchants plan their creative strategy around different times of the year – based on the season, holiday, or popular event. For example, a fashion Merchant will feature different product lines throughout the year based on the season. A fashion blogger will do the same exact thing with their content, so help them produce great content with relevant, updated, and seasonal banners.

In the examples above, Warby Parker is promoting their summer line of sunglasses and Costumes4Less is promoting their Valentine’s Day line. Both banners are appealing to different types of Fashion Affiliates at different times of the year.

4. Product Focused / Deep-Linking

Merchants can provide links that are descriptive and targeted towards specific product pages (called deep links), assisting in the Affiliate’s content development. Deep links are known to convert at a much higher rate because it directs the customer right to the product page – aka they are important! When creating these, Merchant should use their website data, their top sellers or newest items pages to find out what may convert the best for their Affiliates.