Hi, welcome to the online marketing show, this is Joey Bushnell. And welcome to the next episode of the online marketing club mini-series.
We’re currently exploring my top 9 ways to drive traffic which are SEO, Search advertising, Display advertising, content marketing, organic social media traffic, social advertising, email advertising, affiliate traffic and retargeting. In this episode we will be looking at Display Advertising.
What is Display Advertising?
Display advertising is where we buy space to advertise ourselves on somebody else’s website that has already attracted a relevant audience. You may also hear this kind of advert being referred to as banner ads or media buys and there are different many ways to do display advertising. Pay per click is perhaps one of the most common forms, you display your ad and pay a small sum of money each time they send you a targeted visitor. You could pay for your ad to be shown a certain number of times, you pay for impressions as opposed to clicks. Or you could negotiate with a website owner directly and ask to pay a fixed rate for your ad to be shown as a banner advertisement on their website for fixed period of time.
Display ads generally have images or an image/text combination but they can be text only too.
The details don’t really matter; there are different ways to buy ad space. What matters is that you get targeted traffic so this comes down to placement selection so that you then have a good chance to convert that traffic once you get it.
Why is Display Advertising good?
Display ads are great way of tapping into a relevant audience immediately. You didn’t have to spend the time and effort creating the relevant audience, the website which you advertise on took care of that themselves, all you have to do is run your ads and get targeted traffic.
What’s bad about Display Advertising?
Sometimes you can’t entirely control the audience because at the end of the day not every visitor of the website you are advertising on will be relevant to you. This is more likely to be a problem when you buy ad space from a website directly. For example perhaps the website you advertise on has a global audience but your business only serves people in the United States then there could be a lot of wastage there. This won’t always be a problem, it depends on the website you buy from, so when buying space, ask them what targeting options they have.
If you buy ad space via an ad network then you are much less likely to face this problem because all the best ad networks do have targeting options.
Who is Display Advertising for?
Display ads can work for most businesses that have a target market based around an interest or a long term problem. So weight loss, sports, music, hobbies, film and tv could all be examples of markets that could work. Markets where people are only in it for the short term or generally have no interest in until they face the problem will not work so well, for example locksmiths, plumbers, airport transfer, if I need one of those services I turn to a search engine and once the problem is solved, I’m no longer in that market until the next time I may need it, but in the meantime I don’t go browsing locksmith related websites and content. However, Football, weight lifting, rock and roll music, comedy films and marketing software, well I’m interested in those kinds of things all of the time, there’s a good chance I could visit a related website at any given time and you could serve me a related advert that may be of interest to me at anytime if it was coming from one of those niches. So decide if this fits your business. Are your market always interested in this topic? Do read content and visit websites to consume information about this topic? If the answer to both those questions is yes then display advertising is a good option for you.
How to do Display Advertising?
Display advertising comes in many forms. Most the social networks offer display advertising Facbook, linkedin, youtube all offer traditional display type ads and they all have good targeting options based on the behaviour and demographic data that they have on their users. But we’ll cover that in more detail in a future episode when we get to social ads.
Google have something called the display network and bing have their content network. I use Google’s display network a lot because they have a lot of inventory and I think it’s a good place for most people to start. The way it works is you upload your pictures, these will be your banner ads, so make sure they grab attention and aim to get clicks, then you pick what websites you would like your ads to be shown on, remember to choose wisely because the success of your campaigns rests largely upon where you place your ads, so pick relevant websites that will have the kind of audience you yourself would like to get in front of. There’s also plenty of other targeting options to refine your audience selection even further but placement is the big one that you’ve simply got to get right.
These aren’t the only ad networks by the way there’s hundreds, sitescout.com, adready.com and advertising.com would be some others I think are worth mentioning.
There’s also native advertising, this is a form of display advertising which assumes the form of the content the reader is already using, so it doesn’t look like a display ad but it is a display ad, it’s just in disguise! This won’t work when sending traffic to a blatantly commercial landing page but it’s great if you have a piece of content that you would like to drive traffic to. You can buy these kinds of ads from outbrain.com, taboola.com or respondhq.com. You can also get native ads from most social media sites, facebook, twitter, linkedin, pinterest all offer sponsored content which is shown in users newsfeeds, again we’ll cover this in more depth in the episode about social ads.
Then there’s retargeting, retargeting is a form of display advertising with a twist, this is where you can show display ads to people who have already visited your website, so they already know your brand and this is another opportunity to entice them to come back again. Again, this is one of our 9 traffic methods so we will talk about retargeting in more detail in future episode.
And then there’s direct. This is where you can approach a website owner or marketing department directly and negotiate privately without the use of going through a network. If a site you would like to advertise on has ad space showing on their site, send them an email to inquire. Do your best to negotiate a good price based on how much traffic they think you would be likely to receive and your you’re ready to go!
Like I said, display ads cover a multitude of areas and there’s a lot to know, how to create winning banner ad that attracts clicks, how to get the targeting right, how to get good cost per click prices, how to negotiate with sales reps when going direct, all sorts, so if this is an area of online marketing you’d like to master then check out the online marketing club, it might be up your street!
In the next episode we’ll be discussing, content marketing, see you then!