Display Advertising

Display Advertising lets you place targeted PPC ads on a variety of news sites, blogs and other websites across the Internet to reach more potential customers who may not be aware of your brand or business.

These days, everyone is spending more and more time online – and as much as 95% of that time is spent reading and engaging with content on websites. The Google Display Network is one of the tools that can help you reach all these potential customers by placing the right ad format, in front of the right customer, at the right time.

 Why Display?

The Google Display Network can help grow your business by increasing brand awareness, driving additional sales and revenue, and interacting with your current customer base to help generate brand loyalty. A well-structured display campaign will complement any existing Search activity by re-engaging users, and with the price of a click usually significantly cheaper on the display network, there is  a lot of opportunity to grow your overall return-on-investment. We’ve detailed three great benefits of using Display Advertising below.

Drive Brand Awareness

Display Advertising helps generate brand awareness by placing your ads in front of users that would be interested in your offering, or have an interest in your industry. With more and more businesses increasing their online prescience, it’s more important than ever to stand out from the crowd.

Drive Sales

Display Advertising drives sales as you can position your ads in front of users looking for products or services that you offer. You can place ads on related websites or target users who have been searching for products or services similar to your offering.

Drive Loyalty

Display Advertising helps drive customer loyalty by re-engaging interested users. By using features such as remarketing, we can target ads to users who have previously visited your website, reminding them of your business and enticing them back to compete their purchase.

Did you know? The typical combined Search and Display campaign gets 22% greater conversions compared to Search-only campaigns. (Source: iProspect & Comscore real branding implications of digital media – August 2011)

Generally Search Advertising limits the advertiser to text ads only. Display Advertising differs from this by offering a variety of ad formats – to help engage, entice and deliver tangible, measurable results from the advertiser’s target market. Conversions although usually sales and revenue driven, can also be phone calls, bookings or leads – the Display Network can help almost any business. The advertiser can target relevant websites with ads formats such as:

Text Ads

Text Ads are what you’d usually see displayed on a Search Engine Results Page, usually marked as a “sponsored link”.

Image Ads

Image Ads are also referred to as “Banner Ads” and can include text and images.

Video Ads

Video Ads are usually displayed on YouTube and are sometimes positioned as skippable pre-roll ads, amongst other formats.

Interactive Ads

Interactive Ads can be great to interact with users that  feature scrolling products, lightbox ads or other advanced elements.

A common issue that a lot of advertisers suffer, is the lack of a dedicated graphic designer or team  to create professional image ads. Google offer a solution to combat this – you can use the Display Ad Builder to create high-quality image, interactive and video ads. Google offer pre-designed templates for you to edit to your specifications, or the ability to create your own display ads from scratch. The Display Ad Builder tool within Google AdWords lets you easily create any ad for free!

Once you have designed your display ad, the next step is to specify your target audience. Your target audience should be aimed at users who would be interested in the services or products that your business offers, and would statistically be more likely to convert. Google AdWords offers an unparalleled level of targeting, helping you zoom in on your ideal customer, and keep your waste-spend to an absolute minimum. Google AdWords campaigns that target the Display Network can be targeted by:

Geographic

Target your ads to the regions in which your business operates.

Languages

Language targeting allows the advertiser to target users based on their language.

Demographic

Target ads to users who would be statistically more likely to convert.

Frequency Capping

Ensure you are using your advertising budget to optimal performance by managing your reach and frequency.

Ad Scheduling

Deliver ads when your customer are most receptive to your offering.

The next step is to ensure that your ads are targeting your audience in the correct placements, where the ads will gain maximum exposure to your potential customer base. You may decide to place ads against related web content, choose individual websites that you would like to target, or even target users that have previously engaged with your website (remarketing). It is possible to layer these targeting options to really pinpoint your ads to users who have a real genuine interest in your offering.

Keywords (Contextual Targeting)

Keyword targeting helps the system deliver ads against related web-content.

Placements

Placement targeting allows the advertiser to select which website ads should be targeted.

Topics

Topics based targeting includes websites that have similar content to your offering.

Interests

Interest targeting allows us to focus on the user and their interests.

In-Market Audiences

In-Market targeting allows the advertiser to target users based on their search activity.

Remarketing

Remarketing allows the advertiser to target users based on their browsing activity.

Finally, use Conversion Tracking and Google AdWords Reporting to measure the return-on-investment of your display ads, optimise your campaign performance, and make decisions on how best to utilise your overall advertising budget.

There really is no reason not to give display advertising a go today, and start increasing your brand awareness and generating additional sales and revenue for your business!

Here at Circus, we think that Display Advertising should be a part of every advertiser’s digital marketing strategy, and we hope that this article has given you some inspiration for interacting further with your customers via the various features and platforms listed above. If you would like a helping hand with Display ads, or any other element of PPC advertising, then please contact us for a free, no obligation PPC review and consultation with one of our PPC Experts.

Written by Simon Wells PPC Account Manager at Circus PPC Agency