A Guide on Display Marketing

Display advertising is the least intrusive way to advertise on the Internet. They allow you to target specific audiences based on demographics and interests, making them more effective than other types of advertising at increasing brand awareness and product sales over time.
Zaid Abdullah
11
min read

A Guide on Display Advertising

 

HubSpot reports that advertisers spend over $50 million on digital display advertising. But why would they budget so much for this form of digital advertising?

Display advertising is the least intrusive way to advertise on the Internet. They allow you to target specific audiences based on demographics and interests, making them more effective than other types of advertising at increasing brand awareness and product sales over time.

Display Advertising (Source: Sathyamedha)

(Source: Sathyamedha)

Unfortunately, many small businesses don’t take full advantage of display advertising options because they don’t understand how to get started or don’t see its value.

But suppose you want your display advertising efforts to succeed. In that case, it’s essential to understand the fundamentals of this kind of advertising to do it in the most effective way possible.

To help with that, this guide on display advertising will help you get started with this marketing tactic and show you the benefits of using it in your business strategy.

 

How Does Display Advertising Work?

What is display advertising?

Display advertising involves purchasing ad space on a website to promote your business. You will need creatives as part of your ad campaign to drive user engagement to serve to users on a webpage or app. Examples of these creatives include rich media formats such as images, videos, animations, etc.

Some examples of display advertising include banner ads, video ads, and in-feed ads (such as an ad appearing in between list items). While these ads are valuable ways to reach new customers, they can be costly and inefficient if you don’t know what you’re doing.

However, with a little bit of research and planning, you can get results from display advertising to improve your business. In fact, according to WebFX, click-through rates for display advertisements average about 0.46%. That means that only about 1 out of every 200 people who see an ad on a website will click it.

Why should you care about display advertising? Because we live in an increasingly visual world, people tend to respond better to visual content than text-based content. As a result, you can effectively convey your message and capture customers’ attention.

Suppose you want to stand out online and get noticed by potential customers who might not be actively searching for what you have to offer but are casually browsing through their newsfeeds or favorite websites. In that case, display advertising could be your best option.

To get started with display advertising, it’s best first to identify your target audience through their search terms and then create a set of ad groups that you can use to reach them on different websites and devices. You can also run targeted search campaigns using Google Display Network.

Google Display Network is a collection of more than two million websites that reaches over 90% global internet users. To run your ads on the Google Display Network, simply log into your Google Ads account, select “Campaigns”, choose “New Campaign” and choose “Display Network only” for your campaign type. You can then go ahead to select the specific Google Display Network audience targeting types you want to add to your campaign.

Don’t forget to add a unique value proposition (UVP) to your ad copy. This unique value proposition is your way of letting your potential customers know the benefits of doing business with you. But for your unique value proposition to be effective, it must be clear-cut, credible, concise, and without hype.

 

Display Advertising vs. Digital Marketing

How does display advertising differ from digital marketing?

Digital marketing includes search engine optimization (SEO), mobile applications, etc. Meanwhile, display ads are just one type of digital marketing.

While digital marketing includes various channels, display advertising is all about getting your message to customers.

Also, digital marketing tends to be more performance-based than display advertising, which means you’re looking to generate leads and sales rather than impressions.  Because they’re so targeted, display ads are one of the most cost-effective ways to get your business noticed. It's easy to create an ad that delivers just what you want at a price that works within your budget.

 

Display Advertising vs. Search Engine Marketing

SEM and display advertising are pretty different from one another, but the most significant differences can be boiled down to two things: placement and audience.

While SEM allows you to target a specific niche or product, display advertising allows you to place your ad in front of thousands of users surfing the internet using specific search terms. You have less control over the end-user when using Display advertising; however, you can use demographics and behavioral data to attract certain users to your content.

 

Why is Display Advertising Important?

Display advertising is one of many forms of online advertising that your business can use to attract potential customers and drive sales.

Display ads are beneficial for businesses whose products are time-sensitive, such as food trucks or seasonal gift shops. For other companies, display ads can be a great way to increase brand awareness and boost traffic to your website.

Before you get started, it’s essential to make sure that display advertising is suitable for your business and that you have a thorough understanding of how it works.

 

Is Display Advertising Effective?

Display advertising is among one of a business’s most expensive advertising methods, but it remains one of its most effective.

Companies are projected to spend $408.4 billion on display advertising in 2022, which accounts for 55.5% of the global ad spend.

Hence, display ads have proven robust, and when executed well, they increase brand awareness, conversion rates, and ROI. Just make sure you have a good call-to-action (CTA) and landing page for easy conversion.

 

What Are the Types of Display Advertising?

Display advertising can be confusing because there are so many different campaigns with unique strategies. To help you get started with your display advertising campaign, let’s look at the different types of display advertising and how they can benefit your business.

(Source: Trinity Accountants)

Banner Ads

You’ve probably noticed banner ads all over your favorite sites, especially if you visit them frequently. These ads are ubiquitous because they don’t get in your way, and they aren’t as costly to advertisers as other forms of advertising.

However, you must create banner ads that people notice. Try experimenting with size and color to find something that works for your site.

Contextual Ads

The main advantage of contextual advertising is its focus on a target market based on their specific browsing interests, which you’ll get through the keywords they use in their search queries.

For example, if someone has been searching for discount tires, he will likely be interested in purchasing them when a contextual ad for tires shows up.

Video Ads

Video is taking off in a big way on Facebook, with many marketers reporting that it produces significantly better results than either photos or links. However, there’s more to video ads than simply throwing together a quick clip on your phone (or even on a fancy camera).

As with still images, it’s crucial to upload high-quality videos rather than just slap up something you shot on your phone.

Mobile App Ads

Mobile advertising is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s expected to account for more than $62 million in market size worldwide by 2022.

Therefore, marketers can create a mobile app ad campaign to help get new users or re-engage existing users who haven’t opened your app in a while.

Native Ads

These are ads that are placed within a media plan or publication’s stream. This includes text, images, animations, or videos that blend in with their editorial content. Native advertising can vary in form and function, but they all have one thing in common: they are less annoying to users than traditional display ads. Because they appear native to an environment, users won’t feel like they’re being spammed.

Rich media

Display advertising typically falls into two categories: static images or rich media. Static images for display ads are simply that—static. Rich media ads are graphic-based advertisements with embedded functionality (like animations) that can be interacted with via mouse clicks or other actions such as video playback.

When appropriately designed, rich media ads provide more information to potential customers at a glance while increasing overall ad effectiveness. In addition, they help you better control where your messages end up.

Interstitial Ads

These full-screen ads ask you to tap on a particular area to view more information or purchase a product. They often appear when you’re looking at content on your phone or computer; not while you’re doing something else in another tab, but while actively engaged with an app or browsing a site.

Interstitials can be effective for brand awareness if used correctly; however, it’s important to note that these ads can sometimes be intrusive and annoying for users. If your goal is to get people to buy from you, then interstitials might not be suitable for you.

You want them to think about your brand and make a conscious decision about whether or not they want to spend money with you.

 

How Can Display Advertising Help a Business?

Display advertising is an excellent resource for local and national businesses to help drive targeted traffic to their websites.

If you’re looking to expand your business but aren’t sure where to start, look no further than display advertising! Whether you’re trying to build brand awareness, sell specific products or services, or reach new audiences altogether, display advertising can be the key to your growth strategy.

Check out these six ways display advertising can help grow your business below:

1) Increase brand awareness

Did you know that 98% of consumers trust online reviews and read them for local businsses? That’s because word-of-mouth marketing is extremely powerful.

With display advertising, you can place your logo, brand colors, and information on top sites to increase awareness and educate potential customers. It can also be used in conjunction with other creatives and copywriting ideas to complement your efforts.

2) Build a reputation

Successful display advertising campaigns leverage your brand reputation, so that people know what to expect when they come to your website. Once you establish yourself as an expert in your field through copywriting, people will look for you. If you make it easy for them to find you by including the right keywords, they’ll be more likely to choose your business over others.

3) Target your ideal customers

If you’re in business, your job is to make money. But how do you know what your ideal customer looks like? How do you find them, track them and approach them with a product or service they’ll love?

The answer is target marketing – identifying and understanding your audience and selling to them directly. To do this you need to target specific keywords that they include in their search query.

4) Optimize cost-per-acquisition

The quality of your leads is as important as how much you pay to acquire them. That’s why savvy business owners are increasingly turning to cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding and other retargeting strategies. This reduces wasted spending on non-converters, and it also helps you avoid wasting money on overzealous bidding that might drive up costs significantly but do little to increase revenue.

5) Introduce your products/services to new users

Unless you’re using display advertising to spread awareness, your potential customers may never hear from you. Through specialized audience targeting on specific websites with products and services they might be interested in based on their online activity, display advertising can help introduce new users to your business.

You will need to use call-to-actions, extensions (such as call extensions, location extensions, etc.), and landing pages to help increase your conversion rates and boost your ROI.

6) Implement retargeting campaigns

Many businesses have retargeting campaigns, which help bring lapsed site visitors back to their site.

(Source: Terminus App)

If a visitor visits your website and follows your call-to-action to your landing page but doesn’t complete a purchase, sign up for an email list, or use any of the extensions (call extensions or location extensions), you can create a retargeting campaign that shows them ads on other sites with banners and images of products they were looking at.

This helps you stay top-of-mind and reengage site visitors who have already interacted with your business.

 

What Are Some Display Advertising Goals and KPIs?

Advertising on the Internet offers amazing benefits, with one of the biggest being a huge audience. Just think about how many people visit websites each day, and you’ll quickly get an idea of the potential reach that digital advertising can provide your business.

However, the downside to digital advertising is that it can be complicated to figure out which strategies are going to work best for your business and how you can use them effectively. Knowing your digital advertising goals ahead of time is so important. It gives you a clear direction to work towards when determining which approaches will work best for your needs.

Here are some display advertising goals you should consider working with:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Grow your email list
  • Generate leads
  • Drive traffic back to your website
  • Get more social media followers and subscribers
  • Increase conversion rates
  • Boost ROI

Display advertising has grown in popularity over the last few years and will continue to grow, but this also means that competition will increase, as well. The only way to truly gain an advantage with display advertising campaigns is by optimizing your campaign and tracking your performance with key performance indicators (KPIs).

These KPIs provide an excellent way of measuring the effectiveness of display advertising and will help you determine what’s working and what’s not to better tailor your efforts.

Display advertising, when done correctly, can have a significant impact on your business’s bottom line by increasing sales and branding recognition, but it’s not the easiest type of marketing to measure, and it doesn’t lend itself to one simple metric.

While there are dozens of display advertising KPIs that you can track, some are more important than others when measuring the success of your campaigns. Here are some important KPIs you should be tracking on your display advertising campaigns to help ensure success.

  • Bounce rate
  • Conversion rates optimization
  • Click-through rate
  • Cost per lead
  • Pay-per-click advertising
  • Cost per click
  • Cost per lead
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • Return on investment (ROI)
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Engagement rate
  • Pageview

 

Final Thoughts

If you’re still not sure how you want to advertise your business, display advertising might be the right choice for you. It’s an effective and inexpensive way to reach customers worldwide, whether they’re at home or work.

If you are not sure of how to go about setting up a digital advertising campaign, give us a call.

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