Despite Google being the most visited webpage in the world and its absolute dominance in the world of search, what this diagram reminds us is that in relative terms we spend very little time on their site. Out of the average hour a user is online, just over 2 mins of that is spent searching.
So what should we take from this? Despite PPC being a really effective tool to drive business, we need to focus as well on the other 58 mins int he hour. We do that through display advertising.
Display Network Marketing or Adsense used to be all about poor ad placement and targeting and really wasnt worth the hassle. But in recent years a lot of that has changed meaning its possible to get a great return on the money you put in to it.
The reason search advertising is so successful is that you target people when they are ready to buy. This is know as the value moment. But focusing in on the other two marketer’s aims is important too. First, people need to know who you are. they need to be aware of you in order to purchase. Second they need to be enthusiastic about your brand. Really they need to like you. Using Display network marketing (DNS) helps address both of these.
The reasons to use DNS are similar to search which I talk about in my previous post. It gives you great control, you can vary your budget and there is an incredible ability to track. You also get to reach your market before they begin their search. When people are reading blogs, looking at news or videos, their intention isnt to search out information. But by being present there at those times, when they come to the first stage of the purchasing process, you have an increased chance of being part of their initial considerations. Studies show that people are more likely to click on search PPC ads when they have seen display ads too.
When you consider search advertising Google is the only show in town. They have such dominance that you can really focus all your efforts with them. However with display, its not as clean cut. Yahoo and AOL both have decent offerings and need to be considered.
What are your Goals?
- Branding- in this case using pay per impressions is the better option (CPM) (i know those initials don’t really work out!)
- Reaching a specific market. Cost per click (cpc) will probably work better. this is the default setting of a Google campaign
- Geography
- language
- Where are your competitors
- Content based ads. These will use keywords to target ads.
- Placement Ads. You will chose specific sites to place your ads
- Sizes and Styles of your ads. There are 7 different size options. It is advised that you make ads for all 7 because most websites only take certain ads, so not having the appropriate size will limit your options.
Tools ( I will follow up this post with a blog about these tools)
- Google placement tool.
- Double click ad planner
- Google Display Ad Builder
When you set up a campaign as default your ads will be displayed on both search and display. It is advised that you change this. The behaviour of people you are targeting, the keywords you may want to use and the ads you use will all be different. So there for having different campaigns is a better idea.
Content Ads work by choosing a selection of keywords. Your ads will then be placed on sites that use these words. It is best to create a a bucket of terms similar to what you would do in PPC advertising. However it is often the case that you will need less terms as you want the ads to appear on specific type websites rather than being more vague if you choose long tail words.
Placement ads work by selecting the specific sites or the type of sites you want your ads to appear. You can use the double clicker ad planner tool to find out info about a site in advance. This is a real useful tool that tells you traffic to the site, type of visitors and even other sites that they have visited.
When creating Ads for placement it is important to use action words. However these call to actions will be different than those used in search ads. Your targets are in a different frame of mind so using phrases like “learn about” “discover” “find”, are all less aggressive and shown to have better results.
It is also important to envision your ad on the content page. It may look great on its own, but once it is surrounded by text and other content it may appear too busy. Make use of white space. Your ad must also be less than 50k in size.
When starting a campaign, start small and then commit more resources as you learn. Use conversion tracker to see how many click throughs each ad is receiving. Obviously this will be most important for CPC campaigns but by having this function switched on it also allows you to enable view through tracking. This is an incredible feature that allows you to tell if some who has come to your website, has seen your ad before. it works by enabling a cookie one the ad has been displayed to them, and you will be notified if they come to your site within a specified time period after that. This really helps to hammer home how effective your cost per impressions branding tactics are working.
You should use analytics to see which sites are driving the most traffic to your website and also which of them stay the longest on your site. You will quickly then be able to see which sites are worth focusing on and which sites you can specifically omit
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