Your banner ads comply with your brand’s style guide. They’re consistent with your other marketing materials. They feature a strong call to action and functionality that’s intuitive to the consumer.

So why aren’t people clicking?

Online banners – regardless of their size, shape, or format – are held to a high standard by Internet users. Consumers know what they like, and what they loathe. In fact, they’re experts on the subject (a massive daily dose of just about anything will do that to a person).

This attitude compels digital marketers to keep their creative fresh, but it isn’t always fresh enough. It doesn’t always leave site users nodding their heads in appreciation or thinking, “Now that’s a useful ad.” What follows are five ways to enhance your existing and upcoming banner ads to stimulate clicks, shares, and buys.

1. Track mouse movements. Internet users may feel that they’ve seen it all in rich media advertising, but several jaw-dropping technologies are still relatively underutilized. One such technology is mouse tracking. Some brands allow mouse movements to alter the look of their banners (a concept so hip even Google is using it). Others take the more traditional route by inviting users to hover over in-banner hot spots.

One ad for Royal Caribbean created by MediaMind (formerly Eyeblaster) combined mouse tracking technology with an expandable banner in an IAB Sidekick format. In it, the user could hover over hot spots throughout an image of one of the company’s cruise ships to reveal information about special services and features, and click to get even more detail…all without leaving the site page.

Read more: ClickZ

With the skyrocketing popularity and billion-dollar sale of Instagram, there’s an ongoing race to apply Instagram’s wildly successful photo sharing model to mobile video. There are a number of startups vying to claim the “Instagram for Video” title, with Socialcam, Viddy, Klip, Mobli, and even the infamous Color all in the running. Yet, today brings evidence that Viddy may now be the one to beat, as the social video sharing app became the top free iPhone app on the App Store — with much of that growth emanating from its new Facebook Timeline app.

Viddy, which celebrated its first birthday on April 11th, enables users to shoot, customize, and share 15-second video clips directly from their mobile devices. Its video creation platform allows users to choose from custom video overlays and audio effects from their favorite musicians, movies, and celebrities, and share their short video clips across across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubes.

The startup closed a $6 million Series A round back in February from investors like Battery Ventures, Greycroft Ventures, Qualcomm, and Bessemer Ventures, bringing its total funding to $8.2 million. Viddy saw over 40 million app views in January, thanks to the effort the startup has put into recruiting celebrities and influencers custom premium Video FX layers, giving artists, movie studios, etc. a way to promote their brand through mobile video.

Read more: TechCrunch