Types and formats of display advertising in digital marketing strategy. The most common form of display advertising formats are banners. These have many sizes and are constantly evolving to cope with new screen sizes and resolutions, new devices and also new ways to entice and capture the attention of web users. These are displayed in-page, which is to say that they are situated within the layout of the web page itself:
● In-page banner adverts: these are the banner adverts that are ubiquitous around the web. They come in a variety of sizes and need to adhere to strict guidelines so that they can be delivered. These adverts can also be highly customizable to what an individual user has seen or done. In-page banners are typically animated and are designed and built to specifications laid down by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). If an advert simply and passively animates on a page it is almost certainly a standard in-page banner.
A display advert that does anything else becomes referred to as rich media. This is a cover-all term used to describe any display advert that is interactive in any way (such as responding to a user hovering their cursor over the creative) or does anything more than simply existing next to content as described above:
● In-page rich media: these are in-page adverts that have much more functionality or content than a standard banner. The most common examples are:
Video adverts:
- where a full video can play inside the ad creative.
Expandable adverts:
- where the ad expands to take up more (or all) of the web page if the user interacts with it. These interactions can be a mouse-over (or hover) for a period of time or a click. Some formats can expand to take over all or most of the screen (especially in mobile advertising) and that space can be used for far more than graphics – a microsite could be hosted inside the ad.
Data capture:
- adverts where the user can submit their e-mail address to sign up for a newsletter or receive a reminder of a product launch date.
Live information:
- such as prices of an airline route or remaining stock levels for a heavily discounted or extremely popular product, which can be piped into advert creative from product feeds and point of sale (POS) systems.
Mobile ad units:
- these can also take control of some of the phone’s features and sensors such as the accelerator and camera, which could be used to personalize or provide an element of gamification to an advert.
In-stream:
- this is video creative that plays before, during or after video content on the web. Depending on this positioning, these are commonly known as:
- pre-roll;
- mid-roll;
- post-roll.
Video advertising is extremely close to TV advertising in both the content and the form – ad slots are typically of a duration of either 15 or 30 seconds and it is common for advertisers to replicate their TV adverts completely. There are, as always in digital, ways to provide interactivity.
● Skippable video: since 2012 YouTube have offered an additional form of video advertising called True-View (other video providers now offer similar solutions). These adverts can be skipped by the user, which brings three big advantages over traditional in-stream placements:
- The skippable format results in users watching the ad who truly are interested in it.
- It takes away the content length restrictions. As the user gets the opportunity to skip the ad, the broadcaster (YouTube) is happy for the creative to be any length up to 10 minutes.
- Pricing: the advertiser only pays for adverts that have not been skipped.
The formats and guidelines can be found on the IAB’s website: www.iab.net.
Ad servers and technological delivery
What is an ad server?
Ad servers are a core part of the display advertising ecosystem and are used by advertisers, agencies and media owners. They are fundamentally databases but they have evolved into serious pieces of technology and their uses, although not limited to the following, include:
- storing advertising creative;
- passing correct advertising creative to publishers, networks and demand-side platforms;
- managing sequential messaging and creative iteration testing;
- creating and maintaining control/expose groups for testing and surveying;
- recording where adverts have been shown and who they have been seen by;
- storing and creating tags for distribution to publishers;
- creating and counting cookies for exposure and conversion tracking;
- providing comprehensive reporting of media activity, including attribution.
Advertisers (and their agencies), publishers and ad networks use ad servers to deliver, measure, report and verify campaign delivery. The primary function is to serve advert creative to users’ browsers when the browser requests a certain web page. This request involves at least two parties but can have up to several requests in the chain. For example:
- publisher > advertiser;
- publisher > sales house > network 1 > network 2 > agency > advertiser;
- publisher > agency > advertiser.
The publisher’s ad server is primarily concerned with keeping their website furnished with adverts as visitors view pages, while maximizing revenue from advertising campaigns, commonly known as yield. When a publisher has multiple campaigns running from direct bookings and bulk channels such as ad networks, the publisher’s ad server will be considering:
User:
- which adverts from which campaigns the user has been exposed to on their site so far this visit.
Campaign:
- does the user fit any targeting criteria specified by the advertiser?
Frequency:
- has the user been exposed to the specified limit of adverts for the campaign for any given period?
Delivery:
- making sure that all campaigns are delivered in full.
Yield:
- ensuring that the most profitable campaigns are prioritized for delivery over low-yielding ones.
As far as delivery is concerned the advertiser’s ad server is more focused on:
● serving any user the correct creative if there are multiple versions, which may need to be shown to different audiences (for example, new and returning customers); monitoring delivery across multiple publishers or networks and programmatic elements of the campaign.
Fundamentally ad servers take control of ad campaigns and allow advertisers and their agencies to control the management of tags and pixels, track user activity and analyse advertising activity at the end of a campaign or period. However, increasingly, as advertising technology is becoming more integrated, the ad server’s role is developing. This is especially true of Double Click TM, which has been developed to bring together all of Google’s marketing technology platforms.
Types of display campaign
Display advertising has many applications and purposes but below are three main purposes for display advertising: awareness, direct response prospecting and retargeting.
Awareness
This delivers brand messages or immerses customers with interactive experiences to make them aware of a brand, product or service and its benefits. It is far less accountable for providing sales in a direct response approach than the below purposes of display – awareness application of display is not intended to provide sales or be measured that way. Rich media and video are common formats for this.
How this applies to your strategy
If your business is less focused on direct sales through digital channels, such as car manufacturers or estate agents, for example, then brand awareness plays a major part in your conversion journey. Even if you are focused on high volumes of sales online you may play in a highly competitive market that therefore creates a need for awareness advertising.
Direct response prospecting
To find users for a particular product or service and aid consumers on the path to conversion, this activity seeks to find users in highly relevant areas of the web and is really the most versatile use of display. Any direct response advertiser should be using this to gain new customers. Prospecting can actually be used as a proxy for awareness as it is showing adverts to new users; however, as there is often a CPA goal it is done in a more subtle way using more cost-effective formats – mainly banner creative.
How this applies to your strategy
If your business is focused on sales then ensuring you are targeting the right customers at the right time with the right message – and therefore achieving the maximum sales volume at the lowest cost per acquisition – will be a key goal. This is where direct response display fits in. This is the area where people are most sceptical about display due to its history (as discussed above), but this history is no longer relevant.
Retargeting
This is exactly like remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) activity in search but far more powerful as adverts can be shown to non-converting customers across the whole internet, as opposed to simply when they use a search engine. Because this uses first party data from users’ actions on an advertiser’s website it actually helps secure sales from all marketing, PR and promotional activity.
How this applies to your strategy
Retargeting customers can increase conversion rates from existing visitors. This can be highly targeted by following users with reminders of the products and prices they have been quoted. This can be highly effective in ensuring that your conversion rate is optimized even after the user has dropped out of the funnel. Retargeting has been given a bad reputation by some early companies who exploited it to give the illusion that their overall display activity performed better than it was. If retargeting data is mixed in as part of the overall performance data for a display campaign it can artificially inflate the click-through rate. This is due to the fact that retargeting is aimed at warm prospects whereas other display advertising is cold. It is vitally important to use advertisers’ data responsibly. Retargeting with dynamic creative is very common for e-commerce advertisers, especially those operating in retail and travel sectors, where people commonly shop around for very similar versions of products.