Realistically, nowadays in the digital advertising world, it’s become a lot tougher to capture the user’s attention. Digital advertising has come a long way, and the better optimized and engaging your ads are, the more chances they have at attracting user attention, and of course bringing in clicks and conversions.
In the past, digital advertisers have relied on animated Gifs which allow users to view and engage with ad content easily. Simply put, animated Gifs are film formats that combine a series of photo frames in an order that finally forms an animation.
But recent statistics have shown that more than 65% of digital advertisers are choosing HTML5 banners because they bring in a significantly increased conversion rate at a much lesser cost. This article will compare both types and discuss the top five reasons why digital advertisers choose HTML5 creatives over Gifs.
We described animated Gif banners earlier on. But what are these HTML5 banners?
HTML5 banners mean that a banner uses HTML5 elements. They are like websites inside mini containers. In this case, the banner provides interactive elements or better visual elements compared to static banners or Gifs. HTML5 banners combine images, links, text, and programming codes to produce engaging animated content.
Why are Digital Advertisers choosing HTML5?
1. High Performance & User-attention
Recently, the quest for user attention has leveled up, and digital advertisers are quickly dropping the use of animated gifs. Gifs are easy to add to any website page. However, their format makes it non-user-friendly for displaying animation and video content, considering that they come in huge sizes. When it comes to performance and capturing user attention, HTML5 banners are the better choice. Unlike HTML5 creatives, gifs slow down page load speed leading to poor user experience and adding lots of weight to the web page.
2. Possibility to integrate Rich Media
Here stands one big advantage of HTML5 creatives over the regular Gif ads. With HTML5, advertisers can include various types of media elements, such as images, video, and audio streams which allows users to better interact with the ad. Unfortunately, this is not a possibility with gif ads. The possibility of integrating Rich Media into digital ads allows digital advertisers to explore a greater level of creativity and flexibility in producing dynamic creative banners.
3. Better Visual Quality
Successful digital marketers take advantage of the fact that HTML5 banners, unlike Gifs, are not restricted to the 256-color palette. And with the competition in the online advertising market today, the majority of advertisers choose eye-catching HTML5 creatives as opposed to blurry, less attractive Gifs to boost click-through rates. As the CTR rate increases, the site ranks better on SERP, and the conversion rate increases, bringing in a potential increase in sales.
4. Mobile Friendly
HTML5 banners display quite differently from Gifs on mobile devices. More than 70% of global internet searches are on mobile devices. As a result, digital advertisers are choosing to optimize their online ads for various screen sizes to improve mobile users’ browsing experience. Conversely, Gifs are not as responsive and adaptable to be used easily on phones. They can sometimes take up the entire phone screen, and this doesn’t sit well with users, thereby reducing click-through and conversion rates, as well the SEO performance of your website.
5. Smaller File Size
Advertisers choose HTML5 creatives because of their small file size when compared to animated gifs. Small file sizes mean the webpage can load easily and engage better with the audience. Gifs when in motion, re-render every single pixel. Let’s imagine that each frame is 80KB in size. The more frames you show, the larger the file size. But for HTML5 ads, you’ll only need to change an element or a single layer. The rest of the file stays the same, thus maintaining the smaller file size of the HTML5 banner.
But why do some advertisers today still use Gifs?
Animated Gifs do have a few tricks going on for them; digital advertisers still make use of Gifs because these are designers who are already used to software like photoshop, which can export Gifs, but not HTML5. We can all agree that most of these designers are trying to avoid the coding that comes with creating HTML5 ads. That’s why successful advertisers look in the direction of creative management platforms like Somplo, where these HTML5 banners go through a creative process with zero coding.
Are HTML5 Creatives the future for Digital Display?
It’s important to understand that with great work comes better results. Developers put in a great deal of effort in HTML5 banners using different scripts such as CSS and JavaScript to produce visibly engaging ads. Gifs, however, lack this possibility as they are limited in scope with creativity and flexibility.
With Gifs, there are restrictions with colors, and file sizes can exceed the recommended limit. Considering that most DSPs run on a 150KB – 300KB file size limit, you’d be smart to choose HTML5 over GIF.
Remember that digital advertising has become extremely competitive, and to be on the winning side, you’d want to take advantage of the expert experience from Somplo to create converting HMTL5 ads for your campaign.
Curious to know how you can create a winning 150KB – 300KB file size HTML5 banner with Somplo? Find out here.
