This article was written by Ted Dhanik.

The tools that you incorporate into your banner advertising campaign can have a huge impact on conversions. Without tools it becomes difficult to monitor competition and come up with new ideas. The right tool set can provide you with new ideas for ad copy, or find new opportunities to sell.

Keywords

Google’s keyword tool is a good place to start, but it is not available to users without an AdWords account. There are others around the Web that will compare home pages and show display advertising history for a particular keyword from a particular competitor. Keyword tools are also useful for discovering which long tail keywords are actually useful.

Try to resist high competition keywords in favor of anything low to mid-tier.

Analytics

Good analytics will tell you what customers are actually doing when they get to your page. You can use Events from Google Analytics to determine when a customer clicks something or which page a customer came from before visiting your home page. Analytics will also tell you which pages have the highest rate of retention, an important factoid if you’re trying to increase conversions. Look at the most popular pages, and then push some of that copy out to the campaigns that aren’t working as well. Perhaps you’ve already stumbled upon your winning formula.

Networks

The actual network that you use can be a huge benefit for you, if you know what to ask or look for. You should speak with your network representative and find out where the traffic is coming from. Then use that information to view your ads in the wild. When you know what the user sees, you stand to improve your copy with better results.

Ted Dhanik, provider of display advertising and high performance marketing solutions. Ted Dhanik is the CEO of marketing company engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik mentors business owners interested in start-ups.