Advertising for your business online can come in many shapes, sizes, and forms. With every business having unique and different qualities, there never seems to be a one size fits all advertising strategy. What works for one business may not work for another. With this in mind, having a customizable way to promote your business online is what’s needed to help your business succeed.
Display advertising is a creative and customizable way to generate more traffic and build leads in your sales funnel. It’s a popular and effective way to grow your online presence while capturing potential customer’s attention. In this article, we will discuss what display advertising is, display ads examples, where they are shown, how they are measured, and how to create personalized display ads. Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Content Summary
What is Display Advertising?
Where are Display Ads Shown?
How Can Display Ads be Measured?
How to Create Personalized Display Ads?
What is Display Advertising?
Display advertising is a digital marketing tool your business can use to attract more individuals back to your website. It’s a popular form of advertising that has more of a visual-based means of promoting your business. There are a variety of different forms of display ads that can appear as:
- Banner ads
- Images
- Buttons
- Interactive ads
- Fill forms
- Video ads
- Rich media
- Etc.
Along with utilizing one of these forms of display ads, for them to be effective, they need to be targeted to a display ad network to reach targeted audiences. A display ad network is an audience you’re wanting to target with your display ads. This can be based on factors such as demographics, the user’s behavior, geographic location, interests, and the channel in which the ad is displayed. Having a set display ad network helps find the user’s who fit the right specifications in clicking on your ad, being directed to your websites, and (hopefully) converting into paying customers.
Where are Display Ads Shown?
Display ads are typically displayed on the side areas of a website or on social media channels. Depending on the display ad network you’re trying to target, there are a variety of channels you can display your ads in. Some of these channels include Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, specific web pages, and news sites. Being in the online spaces that your customers spend the most time in online will help improve your business display ad recognition.
How Can Display Ads be Measured?
Measuring any form of a digital marketing strategy is crucial in seeing where your business stands as well as seeing opportunities to grow. Learning about what display ads performed well and what ads were not as effective can help your business learn from past and potential consequences of a campaign. Through extensive research and data analytics, there are four areas to focus on when making data-driven decisions about your display ads:
- Impressions: This type of engagement can be a very beneficial statistic to learn about your customers. Impressions typically represent the number of views or people that see your display ad. This metric can provide an understanding of your audience’s size as well as click-through rate (CTR).
- Reach: This metric measures the amount of times an ad is displayed. In essence, it shows the unique number of views from your display ads. When you’re optimizing your reach, it helps direct you in showing your ads to the right people and not the wrong audience.
- Click-Through Rate (CRO): Just as it’s stated, click-through rate means how many individuals click on your display ad. Whenever a person clicks on your ad, it represents the first step in a possible conversion. This area of focus can be important in terms of how effective your ad is and with ROI.
- Conversions: This represents how many individuals converted over to your landing page or website and did a desired action there. The more desired conversions you have, the more potential revenue you could gain through having effective display ads.
Sometimes it can take your business a while to truly find the right rhythm and points in which your display ads become effective. Utilizing and learning more through these four areas in your analytics can truly improve your success rate over time with display ads.
How to Create Personalized Display Ads?
Best Practices for Your Landing Page
While it’s important to have an effective display advertisement, having an optimized and effective landing page is equally important. When an individual views your display ad and decides to click on it to be directed to your landing page, your business needs to make sure it’s set up to be what the individual expects. You can make your landing page effective by including these aspects:
- CTA: A CTA (call to action) is an area of content where you’re trying to lead customers to services and products that you offer. It’s a way to help lead and direct conversions and get more potential customers to perform an action on your site.
- Mobile Friendly: Mobile devices have become the most popular choice for individuals searching for information. With this in mind, it’s important to optimize from a mobile perspective. When your display ads don’t optimize from a mobile perspective, it can lead to poor results and low conversion rates.
Keep it Simple
When it comes to display ads, you want them to capture the attention of the audience you’re trying to reach. While this tip might portray adding lots of details and design elements, it’s actually best to keep things simple in the design and layout of your ad.
If you include all of your information in the space of a smaller display ad, people won’t stop to read the long list of information you have on your ad. Having a sentence or phrase that catches people’s attention helps start a conversion funnel in leading them to your website to learn more information. Avoid overstuffing your display ad with flashy graphics or paragraphs of information. Keeping it simple will be the best solution to your display ad strategy.
Clear Messaging
Having clear and concise language within your display advertisements helps make them more attractive to individuals. While this might sound simple and easy to accomplish, there are multiple factors to keep in mind:
- Use the Right Language: Every display ad your business creates should be different. Each with its own target audience and target goals in mind. With this in mind, your language should be different to help serve the right audience effectively.
- Catchy Copy: Sometimes adding your company slogan, pun, or catchy phrase can help gain conversions. Little ways to draw a happy emotion from a customer can be the winning factor in gaining customers.
- CTA: Having a compelling call to action can be the winning ticket to gain more conversions and revenue. Whether your call to action is through content, a button, or a form fill, having clear content through a CTA can help get more conversions.
Study Demographic Data
If your services and products are very specific and targeted to a specific niche, it’s important to study demographic data to see where your audience is. You might think your target audience perfectly matches an ideal network, however, you need to check if the opportunity is there. Start by looking from a certain display network and work from there. Eventually, you can find where your target audience will be and where your display ad will be the most effective.
5) Have a Measurable Goal
Setting goals right from the start is something your business should always do when starting a display ads campaign. Your business can set attainable goals such as “increasing sales by X%” or, “increasing conversions in X months”. Establishing benchmarks for your display ads can help keep your intentions in mind with succeeding with display ads.
6) Utilize Marketing Strategies
While display advertising is a marketing strategy on its own, who says you can’t implement other strategies as well? Other strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), or social media marketing to help enhance your display advertising. Optimizing with keywords or being highlighted in higher ranking areas helps improve the quality of a display ad overall.