Jane Intrieri
We do a lot of display advertising here at Ifbyphone and through my work on all of our campaigns I’ve faced many challenges in controlling campaigns to achieve positive results. The most important takeaway I can share with you is that display advertising takes a lot of due diligence to achieve successful results. To make your campaigns effective you need to face challenges head on with research, time, and effort. Below I outline the top 5 display advertising challenges I’ve faced and tips on how to improve results.
Challenge 1:
Keeping up with automatic placements and/or programmatic advertising to ensure your ads aren’t showing in irrelevant places.
Tip: I often find hundreds, sometimes thousands, of placements that are highly irrelevant to my target audience. Comb through placements on a daily basis and remove ones that don’t make sense for your demographic. Spend 20 minutes doing this every day. Whether this is through a programmatic process (less control) or manual process (more time consuming), this is key to ensuring your ads appear in the RIGHT places, not just everywhere on the web.
Challenge 2:
A 2014 study conducted by Google found that more than 56% of ad impressions are not seen. If I’m paying on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) basis, this is bad news for my display advertising strategy.
Tip: Set up custom segmentation and retargeting campaigns. It’s important to not only show on the right placements (see above) but to also show the right content on the right places, and even to the right people. With retargeting (through Google, AdRoll, and other third party providers) you can create custom segments with content specific to the demographic and behavior of users in your list. This helps you provide personalized advertisements and marketing content to visitors who have previously engaged with your business.
Challenge 3:
Banner blindness. A 2014 study by Business Insider that produced eye-tracking heatmaps revealed the severity of banner blindness in display advertising (see image below).
Tip: Keep up to date with studies on display advertising and the phenomenon that is “banner blindness”. Studies have found that different networks, websites, and even industries have different rates and locations of blindness. The Google study referenced in tip #1 found that viewability rates vary across content, verticals, and industries, so staying on top of information and best practices in your industry is key.
Also, keep this in mind this tip from Business Insider: “The research finds that the most viewable position is right above the fold, not at the top of the page. The most viewable ad sizes are vertical units, and page position is not always the best indicator of viewability.”
Challenge 4:
Finding the time to keep up with display advertising amid the many other networks you advertise on.
Tip: Don’t “set it and forget it” – display advertising needs to be monitored on a daily basis to ensure placements don’t run wild. Sometimes I see impression spikes in the hundreds of thousands in just a day due to news or seasonality that causes our ad to show up more than it should. Spikes like this can lead to increased cost, unnecessary impressions/clicks, and reduced CTR. Daily maintenance is about keeping up with your campaigns to ensure the health of your overall account.
Challenge 5:
Maintaining consistency across channels with display ads and brand imagery.
Tip: Integrate your display advertising strategy with other channels. One way to do this is through cross channel display advertising, such as promoting tradeshows via display ads. You can also include display ad imagery in landing pages and marketing content. This helps create consistency from the ad the user sees, to the landing page they are driven to, to the content they receive. This helps build your brand while improving results from display advertising.
With display advertising the fact of the matter is that due diligence is required to maintain your campaigns and improve results. To learn more tips on how to improve your display advertising campaigns watch this free on-demand webinar, “7 Tips for More Effective Display Ad Campaigns.”
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