So many factors impact the success of an advertising campaign.
The right target audience might be the richest source of opportunity for your company.
Reaching the right audience at the right time with the right messaging is critical in building brand awareness and familiarizing them with your business and the services and products you offer.
As you generate and convert leads, display advertising is one of the most powerful ways to harvest all of that opportunity from the right target audience.
What is Display Advertising?
When you see banners, images, text ads, and videos for products or services pop up on websites like Facebook, that is display advertising.
Unlike search advertising that uses a pull approach to attract users who are searching for a similar for a similar product or service, display advertising is a push approach.
Display advertising leverages artificial intelligence to target potential customers browsing on a third-party website that has some sort of connection to your company. Consumers then see your display ad and hopefully obey the CTA and click through to your site.
Display advertising comes in many forms:
Text ads. The format of the text ads includes a headline, two lines of text, and a destination URL. Image ads. You can create image ads using gallery templates or uploading your own custom images. Animated ads. Animated ads like gifs can be set to run on a loop. Rich media ads. These ads leverage advanced features like video and audio that encourage users to interact with the ad and encourages them to click through. Mobile ads. As more consumers spend an increasing amount of time on their mobile devices, targeting mobile users is a must. Gmail sponsored ads: Gmail sponsored promotions show up in personal Gmail boxes and are designed to look like emails.
You can target and deploy the ads in several ways:
Site placement advertising. The marketer chooses a specific website or set of websites to deploy their display ads.
Contextual advertising. In this method of display advertising, ads are deployed on any product-relevant websites. For example, deploying display ads for baby food on a blog that discusses newborns.
Remarketing. Remarketing display ads appear for users who have previously been on your site or post-click landing page but left without completing a predetermined conversion goal.
Is Display Advertising Effective?
According to Google, display advertising “can help you reach people while they’re browsing their favorite websites, showing a friend a YouTube video, checking their Gmail account, or using mobile devices and apps.”
By leveraging display advertising, you can get in front of the right consumer at the right time in their purchasing journey. But that’s only the beginning of this method’s potential power.
Users see display advertising 63 times on average per day. Sometimes they don’t even realize they have seen it.
However, to ensure the effectiveness of display advertising, a couple of elements must be considered.
How to Ensure the Display Ad is Effective
Positive User Experience
Display Advertising can certainly be effective if the ad offers the user a positive experience.
A display ad that results in a positive user experience includes the following:
Relevance. Obviously, the ad must be relevant in addressing their pain point, wants, and needs.
Efficiency. For display advertising to be efficient, images and any other media must load properly.
Respect. Display Advertising should respect the customer and should not be intrusive. If the user feels like they have been interrupted, your chances for a click through will drop. Ensure that the ad’s exit button is visible and works properly.
Clarity. Users must be able to understand the ad copy. It should be engaging and concise. And of course, the content and the CTA button should be legible when placed on your ad background.
Value proposition. The headline must be engaging and your value proposition must shine through. Answer the customer’s question: what’s in it for me?
Trial and Error
Try a few variations of your ad. Use different images. Play with the text and the CTA. Analyze the data to uncover which variation is most popular among your target audience.
This real-time user research will help your brand design more effective ads that lead to the conversion goals you are seeking.
Continuously Improve the Post-Click Experience
So, you’ve got the attention of a targeted lead and engaged with the display ad and clicked through.
Now it’s time to reel them in.
The display ad click is nothing if the user doesn’t convert. This is all up to your landing page. Spend some time reviewing the landing page from the point of view of the display ad user.