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Display advertising is everywhere — on news sites, social media, blogs, e-commerce websites, and more! Businesses of all sizes and industries use this type of advertising to reach their target audience with striking images combined with text and links.
In this article, we’ll dive into the benefits of display advertising, why display advertising is important and how you can use it to reach your audience.
What Is Display Advertising?
Display advertising also known as banner advertising is a form of online advertising that combines images or video, text and links to drive users to a website. The type of images can range from a static image or video, to gifs and revolving text. Everyone using search engines, news websites, and blogging platforms have come across some form of display advertising, even if they didn’t know it was.
Types of Display Advertising
This type of advertising has taken the advertising world by storm and it’s easy to find a marketing agency to assist with display advertising strategies. The importance of display advertising is higher than it’s ever been and it’s become an important part of marketing strategies. To make things easier, we’ve taken three main display advertising types and summarized them below:
Site Placement Advertising
This type of advertising is one of the easiest to control as you’ll have full control of where you want your ads to appear. If you approach a news website, for instance, and are looking to advertise a % discount on kitchen appliances, you can choose to advertise only on their home-related news articles and blogs. This ensures you reach your target audience directly and won’t be advertising to an audience interested in motorsport or finance.
Remarketing
Remarketing display advertising is seen all over the internet. Have you recently researched a new kettle and found kettles popping up on different websites you visited afterward? That’s an example of remarketing. Both Facebook (and the companies it owns) and Google use remarketing to lead users back to their respective websites. This type of advertising is highly targeted and personal which results in high conversions according to recent data.
Contextual Advertising
Contextual advertising displays ads based on the surrounding context. Websites that allow advertising (think of bloggers, news websites, agents, and websites like smallpdf) will add banner sections to themed pages. If you’re a hotel that takes online bookings, your ads may show up on travel blogs. Unlike site placement advertising, you won’t have exact control of where your ads are displayed; it’s up to the website owner.
Advantages of Display Advertising
As with most things in marketing, display advertising advantages and disadvantages will differ based on your target market and the product/service you’re selling. We’ve listed four of the best benefits we’ve found with this advertising medium.
Targeted Audience
If you’re running a small to medium-sized business, it’s crucial to target your display ads to your audience. Once you know the geography, interest, behavior, language, and income of your typical customer, you can tailor your ad placement. This ensures you reach the right audience at the right time and place.
Tip: If you own a car dealership and want to promote a new release, your ads can target people of a certain age and income that live in your zip code. Target those users on car review and listing websites to increase awareness.
Easy to Measure
Due to display advertising appearing on digital platforms (desktops, tablets, and mobiles) you’ll have a range of data points to track the effectiveness of your advertising campaign/s. Platforms like Google and Facebook offer metrics like the number of clicks, impressions, unique impressions, reach, cost per click, viewer demographic, etc.
Tip: We always recommend A/B testing several ads with different text, call-to-actions, and images. Give the algorithm enough time and you’ll soon know which display ad works best. This allows you to pause the ones that don’t work, and increase the budget for those that do.
Cost-Effective
Display ads, compared to print and billboards, are more cost-effective. You’ll have the option to create a campaign based on CPM (cost per impression) or CPC (cost per click). Both of these options are very cost-effective and can be tailored to your goals — are you looking to create brand awareness, or want users to click and sign up or complete an online form?
Tip: If you’re releasing an app update or launching your first app, you’ll benefit from search advertising on both the Google Play Store and Apple Store.
Increase Brand Awareness and Visibility
Display advertising will help your get your product or service to the very top of the sales funnel — the stage where potential customers don’t even know they need your product or service. You can choose to have your ads displayed based on the demographics of your audience. Unlike search ads, where the user has to search using keywords, your ads can display with no keywords needed.
Tip: According to Localogy potential customers need to see your brand or business at least 10 times before they gain interest to find out more. Display advertising can help with that and ensure when customers are looking for your product, they’ve already encountered it online and trust it.
Disadvantages of Display Advertising
Ad Blockers
In some cases, your reports may show that impressions are high but you cannot know if users paid attention or noticed your ads. In some cases, users may have ad blockers installed on their browsers that remove the chances of seeing your ads at all.
Lower CTR
Display ads are known to have a lower CTR (click-through rate) compared to the number of impressions it receives. Display ads are recommended for a longer sales process and brand awareness due to the lower CTR.
Although display advertising has some disadvantages, most businesses still use it to increase their brand awareness and find new customers. If you haven’t worked with display advertising in the past, it may be best to use professional social media optimization services by a full service digital marketing agency to assist with the setup and budget allocations. Whether you’re starting a new business, updating your target market, or running a promotion, you cannot go wrong with display advertising.
