You’re definitely on the right track with using text links, most of our top performing creative are text links.
Of course, for optimal results it’s important that text links are used within meaningful content on your site as well as multiple text links as opposed to just one. All too often we come across sites with excellent text content but they have zero or not enough links to guide you the surfer to the next step. For example, there’s a page of text and one link found at the bottom of the page. If you use text with content put more than one link … we’ve found that using 3 or 4 links in a with chunk of quality content works best … I’m not talking about link overkill but enough to make the next step for the surfer natural.
IMO banner ads still do have a merit as well. Banner ads are doing quite well on sites with targeted traffic and interesting information – not talking about banner farms here. As you know we’ll all different … and we all have different styles and preferences … so you’d probably want to appeal to as many styles as possible. As an example, I’m drawn to text – I see text first and the graphics later while someone like my mother sees the graphics first and the text is secondary. So this is one of the reasons why we recommend using text in combination with graphical ads. For short text try something like:
>>>text link with USP<<<
graphic
>>>text link with call to action <<<
Getting back to pop-ups…..I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has had any experience using DHTML pop-ups (Hover ads)? These are those animated sort of floating ads that look and act like pop-ups are actually part of the main page. Hover ads have been used as an alternative to pop-ups and apparently get past most pop-up blockers such as the Google and Alexa toolbars.