Google Adwords Consultant

Display advertising is a type of online advertising that comes in several forms, including banner ads, rich media, video and more. Unlike text-based ads, display advertising relies on elements such as images, audio and video to communicate a message.

Where can you buy display ads?
There are several sources to purchase display advertising inventory from. They include publishers that often times also sell tradition print advertising like a magazine or newspaper, a display network which is a collection of websites. These include specific Google websites such as Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger and YouTube – that show AdWords ads, a real time bidding exchange that operates similarly to a stock exchange, social media platforms like Facebook as well as Mobile Apps .

Different Styles of Display
Display versus native
What separates traditional display ads from native ads is how each appears in their environment. Traditional display ads are shown in boxes of varying size generally appear in fixed positions on a webpage. The ads in the boxes may change but the position on the page always remains the same. Native ads are a style of display that appear imbedded into the content of a page. Ads that appear in the timeline of a social media feed are an example.

Both are paid opportunities but, by fitting in seamlessly on the pages on which they’re placed, native advertising designed to blend in with their surroundings in order to appear more authentic is also thought to be less disruptive.

Content marketing can be considered native advertising, though it is only display in some forms. For example, branded infographics and videos, when positioned neatly in an article, can fit into the display bracket – specifically when they are paid for by an advertiser. Other content marketing formats such as blogs, articles, reviews, and whitepapers, however, are not display advertising; their purpose is to create a value exchange with the consumer with useful, interesting, and targeted information.

Types of Display
Display Banner ads come in many shapes and sizes. There are wide narrow Leaderboards that commonly appear across the very top of a webpage, Rectangles, and Towers or Skyscrapers of different lengths. The wider banner ads generally perform better than their tall, narrow counterparts. According to Google, the most effective display ads are 336×280 or 300×250 pixel rectangles, 300×600 pixel half-page ads, and 728×90 or 320×110 pixel banners.Some banners ads present a single static image with copy while other show a sequence of images designed to tell a story or impart more information that a single image could in the given space.

Not all display ads fit neatly into one of those boxes. Other common formats for both static and video ads include:

Rich media: There are a few varieties of rich media ads. One is the video that unexpectedly starts as the page loads, or the more polite versions of rich media ads just sit quietly on the page until you roll over them with your mouse. Then they expand, like the push down ads that move content downward as you scroll.
Interstitial: An interstitial is the full-screen ad that pops up in between activities, such as clicking from one page to the next or getting to the next level on a page.
Overlay: An overlay is similar to an interstitial in that both pop up and must be X’d out, in order to see the content. However, an overlay is transparent and allows you to see what’s behind it.

Tactics
Branding is one of the most common uses for display ads. The goal is to keep the brand and/or its message top of mind. There is an insurance company that we are all familiar with because of their extensive use of branding online and off.

Retargeting is a form of marketing that targets users that have previously visited a website, with banner ads on Display networks. It works by placing a small, unobtrusive piece of code on a website (this code is sometimes referred to as a pixel). The code, or pixel, is unnoticeable to your site visitors and won’t affect the site’s performance. Every time a new visitor comes to that site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when the “cookied” visitors browse the Web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served to only to people who have previously visited the cookie delivering site.

Retargeting can be a powerful branding or conversion optimization tool, but it works best if it’s part of a larger digital strategy as in conjunction with inbound and outbound marketing or demand generation. Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion optimization. Conversely, retargeting can help increase conversions, but it can’t drive people to your site. Your best chance of success is using one or more tools to drive traffic and retargeting to get the most out of that traffic.

Measures of success
To measure the success of a display ad campaign both Click-through and View View-through Conversions are assessed. A Click Through Conversion is exactly what it says it is. View-Through Conversions are what happens when a customer sees an ad, and then later completes a conversion on your site. Conversions can be a simple as arriving at a page or more complex like buying a product or signing up for a newsletter, coupon, taking a survey, etc.

A common practice is to not only analyze the conversion for a specific action or view of a specific page, but to se where else the “converted” users travel once they arrive at a site. Insights gained from deeper analysis of onsite user behavior can lead to a better understanding of the effectiveness of the display messaging and also help provide greater efficiency when planning where to purchase inventory. An example would be if the goal of the display ad was to convert users to a page that promotes your businesses’ service, and through analysis it becomes apparent that many of the visits from a particular channel on a publisher site go to your careers page, you can optimize your campaign by redirecting the media spend away from that channel to one that provides the desired outcome.

How is Retargeting measured?
Unlike typical display advertising measurement, retargeting actually gives credit to both click-though, and view-through conversions. Often times both are reportsed as a total so you will have to decide how you want to navigate the performance formula. Think of View-through conversions like assists. They are conversions that are attributed to another channel (on last click attribution tracking model) but these conversions were at one point served a retargeting ad.

What are the pros and cons of display ads?
Like anything else, display ads come with their own set of pluses and minuses. On the one hand, everything above illustrates the flexibility. There are countless combinations of formats, sizes, and styles, allowing you to mix it up. Display ads also travel far, given the millions of websites reached by Display Networks. They can match your ads up to websites and apps based on keywords or your own targeting preferences. They’re also fairly straightforward to measure. Display advertising analytics allow you to track the number of clicks, impressions and conversions the ad has generated in real-time, giving you an up-to-date picture of what is resonating with consumers.

But while display ads are so widely used, they’re also widely ignored. Because display advertising is everywhere, people tend to develop a bit of ad blindness. As a result, the average click-through rate across all formats is less than one percent. Viewability is also affected by ad blocking, the use of which has grown considerable over the past years, particularly in Europe.

All that said Display has it’s place as part of a digital media plan. Much like traditional advertising if you put enough of it out there it will be consumed. One key consideration in all of this is that when a consumer is looking for a product or service, relevant advertising becomes far more effective.