Display Advertising

What is Display Advertising?

Display advertising simply refers to the ads that you see on a website. These are the boxes or banners that appear somewhere on the site’s page—off to the side, at the top or bottom, or in a popup that appears when you first get to the site or when you are about to leave it. They typically utilize an image with some text, although they can be mostly text-based or even video-based.

Display ads are different from search ads in that they don’t require someone to search for a term related to you or your business in order to find them. It’s up to you to choose where your ad should appear to fall into your potential customer’s or client’s line of sight and hopefully cause them to act. Because these kinds of advertisements can end up being expensive, it’s important to know what you’re paying for and to choose the look and placement wisely.

Why Display Advertising Helps Your Brand

Because your display ads show up where people are online, they build public awareness of your brand. People notice it and they make associations from it and with it. Research has shown that frequent exposure to any given thing encourages a sense of familiarity with it, which increases comfort level and trust. So, even if someone doesn’t actually click on your ad to complete an action, they see it. They become aware that you are there and available, and they may very well remember you when they do need whatever it is that you’re advertising.

If they happen to be currently in the market and looking for someone like you, they may easily go ahead and click on your ad now and move forward with doing business with you.

Ad Placement

Obviously, you want your ads to appear on the websites where your future clients or customers are likely to be. The general consensus is that ads surrounded by content or immediately adjacent to it perform better than ads standing alone, wider ads perform better than narrower ones and ads farther up the page (“above the fold”) perform better than ads placed toward the bottom of the page—although sometimes footer ads can be very effective. Ad placement is something of a trial-and-error process that needs to be tailored to your particular audience.

You do need to be mindful of where your ads end up, especially if you choose to work with blind networks that don’t let advertisers know where their ads will be placed. There have been instances of extremely unfortunate ad placements, such as the article about riots in Greece next to an ad for a ‘mini-break in gorgeous Greece…’ or the article about anatidaephobia (the fear of being watched by a duck) surrounding a display ad for Aflac (who’s mascot is a duck).

How to Decide Which Ad Works Best – A/B Testing

Say you’re faced with a number of attractive ads and now need to decide which one to use. How can you decide? You test them, using A/B testing. A/B testing, also known as ‘split-testing’ involves running two ads side-by-side to see which performs better. Typically, you would only change one small factor (variable) in your ad at a time, so you can pinpoint which exact piece of your ad makes the biggest positive difference. The elements you choose to test could be the image, a word in the text, a phrase, a Call-to-Action, a color, the ad placement or size, etc. The data you collect from this testing with your potential customers will have a big impact on the kinds of display advertising you do going forward—making you much stronger, more efficient and more effective.

How to Find Your Audience – New Prospecting vs. Retargeting

The best ad in the world won’t work if it doesn’t reach a receptive audience. How can you find the right audience and capture their attention? You have two ways: going after new prospects or retargeting previous visitors to your site.

New ProspectingThis is an attempt to get brand-new customers or prospects to your site. It can be a little like prospecting for gold in the Old West…your chances of success are uncertain, but you may just hit the motherlode and strike it rich. You can dramatically increase your chances of success with strategies that focus on specific slices of potential consumer groups.

• Demographic Targeting narrows your intended audience by age, gender, income level and other socioeconomic factors that affect their spending habits.
• Geotargeting aims at consumers in a specific geographical area. This might be a good strategy for a landscaping business, a restaurant or another service-based business that is restricted to a certain area.
• Topic Targeting means that you choose where your ad will be seen from a list of page topics—you can customize your audience to only those who are interested in topics similar to yours.
• Contextual Targeting happens when you create a list of keywords that matter for your website (which your ad relates to) and display your ads on sites related to those keywords.

RetargetingHave you ever seen an ad appear on a website that just “magically” relates to what you were looking at online the day before? If so, you’ve been retargeted. Retargeting uses cookies (trackers) that take note of where you’ve been online and attempts to bring up ads that you should be interested in based on that past experience. They act as reminders of what you were looking at, so you can go back to the site and, ultimately, complete a transaction. (This is also known as behavioral targeting—targeting based on past behavior). Assuming your potential customer hasn’t disabled cookies on his or her device, this can be a very effective way to capture their interest and generate their click on your ad. You can achieve similar results with lists of people who have visited sites like yours.

An up-and-coming method of targeting is addressable advertising. This “people-based” marketing allows a laser-focus on the needs of individual consumers. It makes targeting even more personalized and better-functioning across a variety of devices—a must in a smartphone, mobile device world.