Display Advertising

An Hour a Day

David Booth, Corey Koberg

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118179710
• eBook ISBN: 9781118240298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

A complete guide to developing, implementing, monitoring, and optimizing an online display ad campaign

The display business is online advertising's fastest growing field. Google and others are starting to provide easy tools to enable small- and medium-sized businesses to take advantage of this opportunity. This guide provides marketers, consultants, and small-business owners with the knowledge and skills to create and optimize a display advertising campaign. It covers concepts, trends, and best practices, and presents a day-to-day plan for developing, managing, and measuring a successful campaign.

• Online display advertising is a hot topic, and this hands-on guide helps marketing professionals and small-business owners gain the skills to create and manage their own campaigns
• Provides an overview of display advertising concepts, including types, formats, and how they're placed on websites
• Explains how to plan a campaign, including defining goals and planning resources, contextual and placement targeting, and keyword use
• Covers campaign launch and measurement, ad creation, social media advertising, how to optimize a campaign, and much more

Display Advertising: An Hour a Day helps anyone promote a business successfully with effective online display ad campaigns.

Chapter 1

Online Advertising

Today’s world can perhaps be characterized by one thing above all others: that we as consumers are always online. As marketers, we are constantly presented with opportunities to get our message in front of the right kind of person at just the right time, and never before have we had this kind of ability to reach, target, and measure the reaction of audiences around the globe. Display advertising gives us the ability to widen our nets as advertisers and get our message out to more and more potential customers.

Chapter Contents:

• An Overview of Search Engine Marketing
• Search Advertising vs. Display Advertising
• Problem Solving and Distraction

An Overview of Search Engine Marketing

Let’s go ahead and admit it: At this point in history, we’re in the middle of the digital age, and it’s getting more and more difficult to find anyone clinging to the notion that the Internet is just a passing fad. This is no latest craze; it is indeed the new normal by which we live our connected lives in a connected world. The combination of ever-increasing accessibility to higher and higher speed connections and a constantly growing variety of web-enabled devices makes it just plain hard to find a place where you can’t be online.

It wasn’t more than a few years ago when airlines were sending out email announcements to their frequent fliers saying, “We’re proud to announce Internet access in some of our airplanes!” In a completely opposite reaction than what we’re sure those nice marketing folks had in mind, many of us immediately pledged to avoid those airlines at all costs. An altitude of 30,000 feet was the last remaining place on earth that a person still wasn’t expected to be online, and there were more than a few of us that weren’t going to book a Wi-Fi enabled flight and risk those few precious hours of freedom from the digital leash.

Times are changing, and the point is, we’re now online all the time. And what are we doing? Well, as it turns out, young or old, you’re probably checking your email more than anything else—at least, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Source: http://pewinternet.org/Infographics/2010/Generations-2010-Summary.aspx

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These days, if when we end up on a flight that doesn’t have Internet access, we start to exhibit signs of what we’re pretty sure is clinical withdrawal after about an hour, and by the time the plane is in its descent, passengers throughout the plane are looking out the window, clutching with shaking hands a phone with a screen so big it barely fits in their pocket, desperately scanning the approaching horizon for cell towers close enough to connect to that 4G network well before the flight attendant announces that it’s safe to return from the land of airplane mode. Take a look around on your next flight and see if you don’t have a plane full of passengers with their Blackberries, Androids, and iSomethings out, downloading the last hours of life as we know it before the wheels hit the runway.

But second to email, we go online to search for something. Search engines have become our gateway to the vast and ever expanding list of things we do on the Web. It’s how we keep up with our news and how we do our banking. It’s how we’re entertained by everything from games and 30-second videos to the latest record label-less sensation or a rant against a nameless fan of the rival team on a sports forum. It’s how we shop for everything from books and televisions to groceries and cars. It’s how we annoy a new generation of doctors by self-diagnosing long before we’ve made it to the waiting room. It’s how we book our flights and choose hotels in the places we’ve already decided to visit based upon the reviews of thousands of other consumers. It’s how we learn. It’s how we share our lives among our closest 10,000 friends. And for a rapidly growing number of us, it’s even how we get our work done, collaborating in real time on the latest sales numbers spreadsheet, scheduling that next meeting, or walking through the latest presentation. Sound like most of your day? Well, in the world in which we now live, that just makes you “normal.”

Search Engine Marketing

Now, put on your marketing hat. If people are using the Internet to do all of these things all day long, then wouldn’t it be great to get your marketing message in front of all those eyeballs? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to bombard those impressionable minds with happy thoughts of your products and services at every turn?

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a loving husband to a very pregnant wife, and let’s also pretend that it’s 3 o’clock in the morning on a Tuesday. It’s right about this time that you’re made aware of an uncontrollable urge for dill pickles and chocolate ice cream, neither of which exists anywhere in the house. Being this loving husband, you realize that at this moment, you exist in this world for one single purpose: You must go out into the night and return with dill pickles and chocolate ice cream.

So you wipe the sleep from your eyes, find some pants and a pair of shoes, and find your way to the car and out into the streets. Then, you see the most perfect, unexpected, situation-saving billboard that has ever crossed your field of vision (Figure 1-1).

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Figure 1-1: Billboard advertisement for dill pickles and chocolate ice cream

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You pull off at the exit, walk into the Dill Pickle and Chocolate Ice Cream SuperStore, and walk out a hero. Consider the day saved.

Now, when you wake up a few hours later and head to the office of the travel agency where you happen to be the marketing manager, you’re so impressed by the billboard that you drive by it again and write down the phone number of the billboard provider. You call the number, and you ask about this magical advertising product that they seem to be offering, and you’re told that you can have one of these too.

“We can place your billboard on some very special roads—roads that allow only cars that contain people who have demonstrated an active interest in booking a vacation.”

“Uh, you can what?”

It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? But this is what search engine marketing has allowed us to do as marketers. We can put up our billboard anywhere on the Information Superhighway in front of eyeballs that have demonstrated their interest in our products and services. If someone goes to Google and does a search for “buy dill pickles chocolate ice cream,” then we have a pretty good idea that they may be interested in what we sell if we happen to own the Dill Pickle and Chocolate Ice Cream SuperStore, so we stick our billboard up there. If someone is watching videos on how to cook lasagna and you sell pasta sauce, that’s where you want your billboard. When people head over to the big screen TV buyers guide blog, well, if you sell big screen TVs, that’s not a bad spot for your billboard.

In a virtual world, we can constantly adapt with minimal time, money, and resources, changing our billboard and changing the locations we put it up to find the optimal audience and the optimal messaging presented at the optimal time. And we can do this because the best part about digital advertising is the amount of data that’s being collected every millisecond of every minute of every day.

Pay per Click Advertising

Now let’s take this one step further. As advertisers, we can create all these billboards and put them in front of only people who have demonstrated their interest in what we’re selling, but how much is this going to cost?

One of the most powerful features of online advertising is the different bidding options and cost models that are available. Depending upon your advertising goals and your budget targets, you have a few options to choose from when it comes to paying for your magic billboards, and the best part about this is the control you’re given.

Cost per Click

In a pure cost per click (CPC, often referred to as pay per click, or PPC) model, you won’t pay a penny unless someone actually clicks your ad. That’s right. It doesn’t cost you a thing to stick your billboard up in front of your target audience—you pay only if that set of eyeballs actually demonstrates an interest in what you’re selling by clicking your ad. Try calling up your local newspaper and telling them you’d like to run an ad but you’ll pay them only if people walk into your store as a direct result. Suddenly it seems pretty clear why traditional advertising media providers are struggling lately.

While Google did not invent the concept of PPC, its AdWords product has been the largest beneficiary of it: By the end of 2011, Google had already crossed into double-digit billions of dollars in revenue per quarter, the vast majority of it being made click by click. It has been so successful because for most advertisers, the model just plain works.

What’s known as the Google Display Network comprises an enormous number of sites that reach over 80 percent of the world’s Internet users, and that’s a lot of real estate for putting up your billboards. Now, add that to targeting options that allow you to stick your ads only in relevant places, and toss in the fact that you only have to pay if someone explicitly registers interest in your ad. Last, throw in measurement capabilities that can measure ROI in near real time and tell you whether your advertising goals are being met or not.

It’s no mystery why this works, and as a result advertisers are more than happy to be buying up display inventory month in and month out, shifting more and more resources from traditional media to the online space year after year.

Cost per Thousand Impressions

But if the CPC route isn’t for you, and especially if you have more traditional branding or positioning goals, don’t worry, there’s a bidding model in the online world that offers you another alternative. Cost per thousand impressions, or CPM (which actually stands for cost per mille) allows advertisers to pay for the impression of an ad without regard for whether or not that ad draws a click.

If you’re promoting a new movie that’s coming out in a few weeks and your goal is to make sure that every non–cave dweller on the planet knows about it, you would do well to use a CPM model and control your costs by paying every time your ad is shown. If you were to run a campaign with a CPM of $10.00, for example, you would be paying 1 penny every time your ad appears ($10.00 / 1,000 = $0.01).

While CPM bidding is commonplace when purchasing premium display advertising inventory and third party audience data, for most advertisers it is typically not recommended for direct response campaigns, or campaigns where the marketing goal is to get a user to do something in response to having seen your ad. What we’re trying to do with CPM bidding is get as many eyeballs as we possibly can on the ad itself. Remember, it’s possible with CPM bidding that you’ll spend all your money without a single click and not a single visitor to your website.

Cost per Acquisition

One of the newer and more exciting bidding options available to search marketers is cost per acquisition (CPA). If you have a direct response type of conversion, meaning you want something tangible and measurable to happen as a direct result of your advertising, then you may want to look at CPA bidding.

As an example, let’s say you have an online store, and on average you make $10.00 profit from everyone who purchases from you. The purchase itself is your conversion, and you are willing to pay up to $9.99 for a conversion to stay profitable. Well, in a CPA model, you don’t bid for clicks or impressions—now you’re bidding for those conversions.

Google AdWords currently offers tools like the Conversion Optimizer and the Display Campaign Optimizer that will evaluate dozens of factors as your ads are displayed across a variety of web properties to a variety of users. The system begins to learn which types of users, which times of day, which language settings, and even which browsers and operating systems have a high probability of resulting in a conversion action, and the system then uses this information and tries to get as many conversions as it can for you based on your CPA bid.

Search Advertising vs. Display Advertising

Whichever way you choose to pay for it, if you’re going to do online advertising, one of the most important decisions you’re going to have to make is how to allocate your marketing dollars across search and display advertising.

Search Advertising

By now, search advertising is both sophisticated and mature, and it has been used very successfully by a lot of people for a lot of years. At ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Display Advertising: An Hour A Day
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: Online Advertising
• Chapter 2: Overview of Display Advertising
• Chapter 3: Fundamental Display Advertising Concepts
• Chapter 4: Month 1: Planning Your Campaigns
• Chapter 5: Month 2: Targeting Your Audience
• Chapter 6: Month 3: Building Your First Display Campaign
• Chapter 7: Month 4: Creating Image Ads
• Chapter 8: Month 5: Video Ads
• Chapter 9: Month 6: Launch and Measure Your Campaign’s Performance
• Chapter 10: Month 7: Optimizing the Performance of Your Campaigns
• Chapter 11: Month 8: Advanced Topics
• Chapter 12: Month 9: Using LinkedIn and Facebook Display Ads
• Glossary
• Index
• Advertisement