Banner Ads Are For Branding and Retargeting

Banner Ads Are For Branding and Retargeting

Banner and Display Ads are for Branding & Retargeting

I didn’t get any conversions…

I hear it all the time and it’s always a blow to hear that an agency was trusted to bring conversions and leads using banner ads and nothing else. Yes, you heard me correctly. As a responsible agency owner yourself, your heart may have just cringed, too.

Let’s dive deep into what banner ads are and more importantly, what they are not. We’ll look over ways you can best work with Traffic Oxygen, your Project Manager, and manage the expectations of your client. You worked hard to land your client; keep them by keeping it real.

Banner Ads for Branding and Retargeting: Your Responsibility as an Agency Working With Traffic Oxygen

  • Know your target audience
  • Have a branding vision, slogan, offer for your creatives and offer
  • Load your creatives or direct our graphic designer in their creation
  • Set realistic expectations for your clients based on your discussions with them on how you will measure and define the success of your project

Why Didn’t my Campaign Bring Sales?

Traffic Oxygen is the Billboard you see driving along the highway (metaphor, here, marketing Rock Stars). If they drive by every day, you may become memorable enough that they look you up when they need you.

No one expects a billboard to make your target audience purchase your client’s product or service. The owner of the billboard would never charge for that exclusive real estate by how many people made a purchase, right? How could she run a profitable business when so much is out of her control?

Let’s say that billboard is showing a new restaurant: what if they have received multiple bad reviews? Is it the billboard’s fault? Or if that target client does visit your restaurant and they can’t get parking, the kitchen is filthy and there was bad service… did the billboard fail you or was a solid business foundation not laid before trying to bring in the masses?

We can create your landing page, create great banners with your direction, and help you craft a great offer for that restaurant. Now ask yourself, what market research was done prior to taking on this client so you can feel strong about putting your name on their campaign? Did you analyze the competition, do you know why they are flying high or crashing hard? Lay the foundation and don’t be afraid to turn down a client that you can’t help bring success.

This is a Team Effort! You and your client, you and Traffic Oxygen and the tools you use to find their success. – Kendra EJ Woodruff

 

Banner Ads for Conversions/Lead Generation: Danger Zone

  • Banner ads are one component of a lead generation machine
  • When a marketing funnel is set up using multiple verticals, it’s highly beneficial to your efforts but will not work with just one component in place.

 

We are Traffic Oxygen, not Conversion Oxygen

We measure success by your Click-Through-Rate (CTR). When your CTR goes up, we feel successful. When your CPM goes down, we make adjustments and make suggestions. We see hundreds of projects each month and may just know a thing or two about how you can bring more interested traffic to your website and get more eyes on your brand.

If you’ve discussed TO services with your clients as lead generation or conversion magic, it’s time to revisit those discussions. If you have layered TO into your robust, full-service agency lead generation bag of tricks, you are correctly serving your clients and we’re proud to be your banner and display ad platform.

Have a peek at Banner ad industry-standard click-through rates.

If you feel rusty on just what it takes to drive leads, brush up on these killer lead generation tactics.

What Banner Ads Are

Branding. Retargeting. Period.

  • Banner ads are at the TOP of your marketing funnel, it’s cold traffic, it’s the first date. No one is going to marry you on the first date. Still brushing up? Wordstream says it best with this overview of the Marketing Funnel.

Our targeting and audience pools (in my humble opinion) superior to any 3ed party data I’ve seen in the industry and I’ve been in marketing and advertising since the days of five-buttons and your Google Ads were running. – Kendra EJ Woodruff, Marketing Director of Traffic Oxygen

As such, conversions can happen when the creatives are spot on, the offer is enticing and the timing is right. We run your banner ads and introduce your brand to your identified audience that’s most likely to take your call to action (CTA).

 

What are the Responsibilities of Your Project Manager?

  • Set up your campaign from the details you’re provided on your ideal client, patient, or customer.
  • Manage the real-time bidding of your campaigns
  • Monitor click-through-rate (CTR), Impressions and optimize for your best CPM by dialing up on publishers who bring you good traffic or dialing down and sometimes turning off those that do not perform.
  • Advise you of the availability of third-party data points.
  • During set-up/onboarding, your PM will advise you of which of our campaign types best fit YOUR agency strategy and objectives. We will advise you on what may bring you the best traffic or CTR for your ad spend.

 

Want to Take Your Campaign to the Next Level?

For marketing strategy and marketing research assistance, specialists are available to you with your projects.

5 display Ad Tips To Create Better Branding

5 display Ad Tips To Create Better Branding

Display ads of all colors and sizes are common ornaments of almost all web pages.  In fact, odds are you’ve seen several display ads today while browsing the internet…but do you remember them?

If you are part of the overwhelming majority of the population and if the ads you recently viewed were comparable to most display ads, you likely don’t recall the companies or products that were showcased by the ad.  In the digital marketing word, there’s a term for this condition and it’s called Banner blindness; a very well known and real trend.  Of course, you want to make sure this doesn’t happen with your display advertisements.  Read on to learn how to avoid Banner blinding your audience.

Assuming that your goal is to ensure web site visitors are able to see and click through your banners and display ads as opposed to instantly closing or ignoring them, below are the most beneficial steps you can take to turn web viewers into your customers.

1) KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid)

Of course it may seem like the best way to get the most bang for your advertising buck is to spend the most dollars possible on your ads and put as much on there as you can.  However, this isn’t the best plan as marketing data clearly demonstrates that small sized display ads can easily be cluttered with too much content that only serves to confuse the viewer and make the ad more challenging to read and absorb.

Don’t be this person:

The key to remember here is to make sure your imagery, messages and Call-to- Actions are as straightforward as possible and easy to read and grasp quickly.

Although your ad may be minimal and not saying much in terms of quantity, a clean ad design with an effective amount of white space and a defined hierarchy and purpose is the most effective choice.

2) Select High Quality Ad Assets

Although you ad is likely small, don’t take this to mean that you should skimp on investing in quality ad components.

Instead, opt for high-quality illustrations or photographs, depending on your purposes. Use a site like Envanto to gain access to quality images for all your needs.

Go for clearly legible fonts and take special care to have logos that pop and are especially crisp.

Equally important to remember is that your ad should be designed to export at the highest quality it can while still falling within the 150 kb maximum file size for Google Ads.  As a final quality tip, always double check your exported images before you upload them.

3) Make it Pop

Your ad should be distinctive enough to stand out to your visitor from the rest of the text and images on the webpage.  This concept is not just about making your ad attractive, but rather it gives your ad a better chance of ad network approval.


Your border design is significant when it comes to helping your ad pop.  Aim for clearly defined borders; you can do this most effectively by placing y. our images and colors on the edge of the ad.  This is good practice in regards to ad compliance but also is a great strategy for drawing a visitors eye to your ad.  Marketing analysis has proven that our eyes tend to gravitate towards words or images that are in boxes.

4) Relevance Is Key

Marketing goes well when your ad is relevant to the correct audience. That means timing, images, offers and text.

Keep your end user in mind. Keep their experience in mind. You want your ad to appear so seamless, so perfect, they are actually thanking you for showing them an add because it’s perfect for their situation.

5) Keep Branding Uniform

Two items come into play here. One, you always want to keep a similar feel or vibe to your ads. Soft colors vs. bright, fonts used, backgrounds. Now, you don’t want and/or need all your ads to be exactly the same, but you want people to be able to recognize it’s your brand without seeing your logo. They instinctively know it’s you.

Airbnb does a great job at this. The red and green set has the same offer, but slightly different, giving the user a different experience every time they see an Airbnb ad.

And we can even compare a completely different offer, this one used to bring in new guest rather than host. The branding is similar. For Airbnb, that’s simplistic with their logal being very clear. No matter what, when you see either of these ads, you know it’s Airbnb.

This is critical as our eyes tend to glance over ads after we see them too many times. If the user continues to see similar branding, even if they are only glancing by it to something more important at that given second, you’re priming their mind to recall your brand when the time is right.

And two, you also want the ad to have a similar feel to the landing page your user will land on. Nothing is worse than clicking on an ad and going to landing page with completely different colors, products or overall feel. It’s not what the user was expecting and they will leave immediately.

Summary

Now you’re ready to create your ads, get them in front of the right audience and grow your message.

Keep your message simply, think about the user experience and give them something they should thank you for.

Any tips to add based on your experience?

To talk to the writer of this article and project manager, Elliot, about any of your marketing needs, fill out the form below that goes directly to him.

Call To Action, Display Ads To Landing Pages

Call To Action, Display Ads To Landing Pages

Real talk: although it would be nice, not all digital marketers are working with a Coca-Cola sized ad budget.  In all my time as a digital marketing professional, I’ve never had a client with exorbitant funds available to drop on target audience and persona research.

Fortunately, for my clients, I come with knowledge and resources, no major study required.  Additionally, I have the ability to access quality, free data from Google Analytics– in fact, so can you.

Displaying Google ad campaigns on the Display Network is a common strategy that you can implement to boost brand awareness.  In this case, you’ll probably want to direct the web traffic to your landing page; as you select your Call to Action (CTA) for these ads, you’ll want to choose wisely.  Your CTA is the first glimpse a web visitor will have of your brand, and first impressions are critical for setting a web user’s expectations of what will come next as they interact with your ad.

Ad Call To Actions

There are ways to test your Call to Action so you can make sure to pick the right one for your ad; my tips for this are outlined below.  The often used “contact us” CTA is a hard sell tactic and may not be the message your prospective customer wants to see right off the bat.

Let’s break down how you can use analytics to explore whether or not you should begin with a softer approach such as “chat with a specialist”, or perhaps “see plans and pricing”.  These messages might actually be more appealing to your target audience instead of a CTA that sends the message, “buy now”.

Look Over the History of Actions Taken By Previous Viewers Of Your Landing Pages

If the ultimate link on your display funnel leads to a currently live landing page, look at your data to find out what it is that visitors on your page tend to do once they get to the page.  You may already feel you know the ideal CTA for your ad, based solely upon your intent and your current page layout, nonetheless, when it comes to what your visitors actually do on your web page, you might be surprised.

To access your Landing Page information and user history, go to Google Analytics and navigate to the Landing Pages report.   Next go to Behavior > Site content > Landing pages.  You can see every conversion action taken by your users once you locate your landing page; from here you can determine what action is preferred by the majority of web users on your landing page.

Although Google Analytics is one effective option for finding this information, Google Ads also has a new and helpful interface which allows another option to review your landing page conversions.

If you’re still skeptical about this new interface, you should know that it has a pretty useful feature for displaying your landing page statistics on a group or ad campaign basis as seen below:

If your landing page offers visitors multiple actions to take, such as filling out a form or calling your company directly, you’ll be able to see this information differentiated on Google Ads so you’ll know which action is more popular with your users.

To talk to the writer of this article and project manager, Elliot, about any of your marketing needs, fill out the form below that goes directly to him.

Does Your Ideal Prospect Even Know You Exist…And How To Make Sure that Changes With Good Online Advertising

Does Your Ideal Prospect Even Know You Exist…And How To Make Sure that Changes With Good Online Advertising

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Not too long ago, putting up a website was the only online advertising strategy that a business owner needed. Start a Facebook business page, grow organically, sales were great. Today, most the platforms, including Facebook, are pay to play, meaning to grow organically, well, just don’t try. All the platform survive off advertising spend, it’s no surprise they increasingly make spend more of a forefront for all businesses that want to use their platform to grow.

Why Online Advertising is Crucial

Roughly 70% of the population has some sort of social media profile. You can bet the other 30% still uses Google, Bing or any other major search engine on a daily basis, too. Not only are all your potential customers online, but online advertising has given you a unique way to target your users. When online advertising is done correctly, you’re only showing your ads to your ideal customer, and in many cases, the customer is appreciative they were either reminded you exist (because we are shown a million other items every day) or they now know about a new product that can change the way they live their life.

Display Advertising

Display advertising uses websites, apps and some social profiles (Youtube) to show advertisements and deliver specific brand messages. This online method employs a wide variety of formats and includes images, videos, flash, audio, and text.

There are many ways display ads can reach your ideal customer. One common technique is to pay for sponsorship. This adds a brand or a logo to the design of a website. Another way to make space visible online is through overlays — advertisements that pop up or appear as a website is opened.

The Real Value of Display Advertising

Many advertisers say that display advertising does not yield a satisfactory number of clicks. A good number of critics say that to drive clicks, paid search advertising is still the way to go. I wouldn’t argue that statement.

If any business enters into a display ad campaign and expects the same results and say Google AdWords (now Google Ads), you will be disappointed.

The role of your display ad campaigns is brand awareness. Always reminding your customer you exist. So when something breaks, they get a bonus and want to splurge OR they see your Facebook ad running, they already know who you are.

You are priming their mind to recall your brand!

Making the Most of Online Advertising

Online advertising, particularly display ads, provide an opportunity for companies to target their ideal prospects. This intensive focus is achieved through thorough study of the demographics, the interest, the geography, and the purpose of Internet users as they go through thousands of websites. Examples can include showing ads to people who visited your website before, city they live, sex, age, income, political views, buying habits, car they drive, and the list goes on and on and on.

Optimizing Online Advertising through RTB

Attention on the internet is…minimal. We have so much information coming at us, it’s hard to stay focused on one particular item or task. This poses some problems for a business when you’re trying to get someone to pay attention to your message.

To conquer your ideal prospects from among the masses, online advertisements need to be targeted, massive and widespread. As a business, you need to be showing your ads on multiple websites and multiple times a day for each consumer.

Real time bidding achieves this with display advertising, getting you in-front of your ideal customer in the most cost effective way.

How Real Time Bidding Works

With RTB, an advertiser bids in real time for online ad impressions through supply-side platforms or ad exchanges. Auctions for RTB take place in the time that a webpage would load, and the site being auctioned is one being viewed by a user. Once you win a bid for that site, your ad is immediately loaded. This whole process will only take seconds, and the viewer will catch your advertisement while he or she is on that page. The key to all this is the ad impression. The ad exchange is able to project the advertisements that a user is more likely to welcome.

RTB has several characteristics that allow your display ads to successfully accomplish your online branding targets. RTB is efficient. You are able to access a wide number of sites and pick the ones with impressions that you think will work best. Everything happens quickly enough to catch your ideal prospects while they are browsing around the Internet for similar goods. In addition to this, RTB allows you virtually limitless exposure.

When all is said and done, in today’s business environment, display advertising and RTB are a combination that bring your brand and products or services to the market that you want to reach.

To talk a Project Manager about any of your marketing needs.

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3 Reasons You Should Consider Display Ads

3 Reasons You Should Consider Display Ads

Adding Display Ads to your Marketing Strategy

Online visibility and performance is a key measure of the viability of a business in today’s market.  In an era in which consumers and businesses alike utilize the internet across all facets of everyday life and the exchange of goods and services, a strong business requires a marketing strategy inclusive of well-planned display advertising.

Despite some unfavorable press and the assertion by some that AdWords are preferable because they’re more targeted, Display advertising has consistently been irreplaceable in digital marketing strategies for the following reasons:

  1. Gain Global Brand Awareness

Display ads are the best way to generate brand interest and awareness.  AdWords campaigns on the other hand are not as far reaching.  Display ads cast a global net; what this means for the growth of your business is that your products and services are presented to a wider variety of potential clients or customers.

Compared with SEO and PPC, Display Advertising shows your business to users that could be a match for your services and products whereas SEO and PPC is helpful only for those who are searching and looking at that moment for one of your services.  In other words, Display advertising is geared towards connecting with your target audience through a visual ad and these potential customers may not be actively seeking you out. Even if a user does not click on your ad, they’ve seen the image you wanted them to see and this will help them recognize your company later or remember you when they are seeking your products or services.  Display advertising is also arguably the least expensive way to spread brand awareness on the web.

  1. Optimal Customer Loyalty

Retargeting is a savvy strategy for touching base with previous buyers or visitors.  By displaying an appealing ad for your service or product, you’re encouraging a previous visitor to go back to your website and take another look or make another purchase.  Your Display ad can be retargeted to catch the attention of anyone who has been to your website in the past or purchased from your company.retargeting display advertisingRetargeting is a fabulous way to amp up your conversion rate optimization.  Your website is designed to entice the user to fill out a form or make a purchase or other inquiry, retargeting is a way of attempting to ignite such conversion activity on your site.

 

  1. Drive more leads, increase conversion rates, and augment offline sales through Display ads

Display advertising has been used for years, and it’s proven to be effective as a digital marketing service that works and produces measurable results.  Your display advertising, done right, will drive up your sales and lead generation.  You’ll be pleased to notice the improvement to your ROI when you optimize your Display ads.

Keep in mind that you’ll want a display banner that’s designed well enough to impress your potential or returning customers and spark their interest in visiting and making purchases at your online store or website.

A great way to utilize Display advertising is to promote special or seasonal offers or to advertise new products.A trick of the trade that proves itself effective for many companies is to include an end time on the offer; this creates a sense of urgency and can produce a FOMO type of feeling which means more web traffic and potential sales for you.

To talk to the writer of this article and project manager, Elliot, about any of your marketing needs, fill out the form below that goes directly to him.