In the world of business competition and globalization, we have to grab every opportunity that can lead to recognition and new customers. We also have a huge variety of methods to achieve that: blogging, outbound marketing, social media, podcasts, and advertising.
Advertising can be sometimes be overlooked as a method for big enterprises with thick wallets, but that’s not exactly true. Display advertising or display ads are being used by everyone from small independent businesses to corporations, for at least one big reason—brand awareness.
In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about display ads, their definition, types, benefits, and examples—all to get you started with display advertising.
What Are Display Ads?
Display ads are ads in the form of videos or images that are shown to your audience during their web browsing. They can appear on any website, app, social media platform, or even a TV device.
They are used for raising brand awareness, promoting certain products or services, announcing discounts or events, and more, with an end goal of making people familiar with your brand enough to consider hiring you.
Display ads can be presented as videos, images, gifs, or even polls and surveys. They are also used at every stage of a buyer’s journey.
How Do Display Ads Work?
The main component of a display ad is content that will draw the attention of a potential customer. The style can vary from bright colors and flashing images to minimalistic designs and simple CTAs.
Basically, you start with an ad that speaks to your possible target audience and place it somewhere on the web where it is most likely to be discovered. The questions that have to be asked during the creation of the ads are:
- Where will my ad be most seen?
- What design will draw the most attention?
- What text will make them click and perform the desired action?
Answers to that will compose a good, productive ad.
Types of Display Ads
The most traditional display ads are banner ads with a variety of formats (jpg, gif, HTML5, mp4) and sizes. They are usually placed on social media, niche platforms, Google Display Network (GDN), and Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN).
Besides that, there are a few more display ad types for you to discover:
- Responsive display ads (RDAs). A responsive display ad is an advertisement that gets produced in multiple variations in order to adapt to various placements and users. By using RDAs, you save time, and instead of one ad, get a whole package of them.
- Native display ad. Native ads are advertisements that match the style and vibe of the website they are on. Although these ads work well, they may not be the most effective in standing out and stopping your lead from scrolling.
- Video display ads. Video ads appear before the video content a user searched for and usually have a skip option (although some have to be watched fully before getting access to the desired content).
- Dynamic display ads. These display ads form their content based on the data from the browsing activity, personal interest, and stages of the buyer’s journey. You may have witnessed the shopping type of that ad when you google “photo cameras,” and in the next couple of days, they’ll be on every website urging you to buy and to do this you’ll need the right DCO platform.
Besides thttps://blog.hunchads.com/dynamic-creative-platformshese ad types, there are plenty to choose from: overlay ads on top of content, interactive ads like polls and quizzes, reward ads that offer a prize for engagement, or ads that respond once you engage with them. Most importantly, choose at least one of them, get creative, and make it compelling enough to enhance your marketing efforts.
Benefits of Display Ads
Just as any tool, display ads have their pros and cons. Among the biggest cons, there is a possibility of being filtered by an ad blocker or ignored by the users. However, there are much more pros that should convince you to consider them for your marketing strategy:
- Big diversity of formats. Display advertising is anything but a stale construct. There are plenty of types of display ads you can use, plus several formats to chose from. Want something bright and catchy? Sure. Want to target interested customers or just spread the word? You got it.
- Wide reach. Usually, outbound campaigns heavily rely on finding potential customers prior to contact with them. With display ads, that’s not really necessary. If your goal is to reach a new audience or raise brand awareness due to the power of the web, your ad can reach millions of users all over the world.
- Targeting and segmentation. Continuing with the previous point, wide reach doesn’t mean random. Depending on how specific your targeting criteria are, you can choose what people and where to see your ads. You can target users based on the keywords they use, websites they visit, or on their interest in your services.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Display Advertising
Once you present your display ads to the world, you’ll want to know whether they are working. The biggest KPI to track here is the click-through rate, although you need to know your impressions and conversion rate as well.
Impressions
Every time your ad appears on the web, this is called an impression. By counting impressions, you get to see how many times your ad has been presented to a user on a certain website. The math is simple: The more impressions you have, the wider audience you reach. However, if besides impressions none of the other metrics are growing, you may need to fix the problem with your targeting or messaging.
In addition to impressions, you should measure the reach. The reach is the amount of unique impressions, or the number of times a user has seen your ad. This metric is meant to optimize your targeting and avoid showing your ads to the wrong crowd.
Click-through rate
Click-through rate (CTR) is the number of people that click on your ad. Clicks measure the engagement with your ads; however, you should also consider why they clicked and that’s a task for conversions.
To measure your CTR, divide the clicks on the number of impressions and multiply it by 100 to get your percentage. For example, if your ad got 18 clicks and 500 impressions, your CTR would be 3.6%.
What is a good CTR for display ads?
Since every advertising campaign varies based on goals, targeting criteria, audience, and industry, there is no way to say there is one magic number you should strive for.
Although, according to various reports the average click-through rate for display ads across all industries is somewhere between 0.35% and 0.9%. Some industries, like advocacy and technology, can up their game up to 0.84%.
Conversion rate
It’s common to assume that the click-through rate is the highest measure of the effectiveness of display ads; however, you may get thousands of clicks and no real business opportunities. That’s why you should also keep track of your conversions.
Conversion rate is the number of times the desired action was performed through your ads (subscribe, buy, take a quiz, provide contact information, etc.). If your conversion rate is low, you should do some optimization of the ad and check if the traffic you are getting is enough for your goals.
Display Ads Examples
To provide you with some inspiration, we’ve analyzed some display ads out there and analyzed why they were effective:
1. HP
This HP ad is quite simple. At first glance, you understand that the product being promoted is a printer. However, it perfectly targets mid-size and small companies that face tax season and urges them to consider their needs before it begins. Minimalistic design, without much text, does the most important job: It answers when and why someone might need their product.
2. MailChimp
MailChimp is an email marketing company that chooses creativity to stand out from the crowd. While the first example focuses on a certain product, MailChimp’s clever ads raise brand awareness and stop the users from scrolling. It uses a series of images that play with their company’s name and make the users stop, laugh, and share.
3. Samsung
Samsung faces great competition from at least a couple of sharks like Apple and Microsoft. With this ad, it went with an extra minimalistic design and as few words as possible. The goal was to stay on the elegant side and capture the attention of their target audience—creators and remote workers.
Use Display Ads for Lead Generation
Display ads are great for boosting brand awareness and activating audiences worldwide to get new leads, customers, and sales. They are easy to use and track and have a wide variety of types and forms. So if you were looking for new ways of acquiring customers in a digital dimension, display ads might be exactly what you need.
About the Author
Anastasiia Holovnenko is a content marketing specialist at CIENCE. She creates articles and guides to help businesses uncover growth hacks from an outbound perspective. She is passionate about psychology, literature, and cinematography too!
