Targeted Display allows marketers to place digital advertisements in front of a specific audience while browsing publisher websites. Like traditional advertising, relevant banner ads are used to influence brand awareness, improve impressions, and generate conversion. The difference is that targeted display ads aren’t stuck in one place, but are displayed on premier websites your customers visit frequently.
Targeted display ads utilize revolutionary technologies to target audiences based on demographics, location, and other factors that influence their shopping or search behavior. At WAY Nation Solutions, we utilize the latest technologies in Targeted Display Advertising to tactically target your potential customers, creating a lasting impression for your brand.
What are the Types of Targeted Display Ads?
Over the years, display advertising has matured to be an extremely recognizable way customers engage with their preferred brands. According to Simplifi, an average of 86% of customers engage in “ROBO” research online, buy offline, making targeted advertising a beneficial marketing asset for brick and mortar businesses.
Before diving into a targeted display campaign, it’s important to note the different types of display advertising that could benefit your ROI goals.
- Traditional Display Ads: Consisting of a variety of mobile and desktop image sizes. Traditional display ads can be static or animated in nature and can be served on a variety of devices to target your audience at each phase of their research and purchasing cycles.
- Native Ads: Designed to look like organic content, native ads are strategically placed on a website or platform to resemble “search-worthy” content.
- Social Ads: Social ads can appear as native ads and usually contain a specific call to action. Social ads can also fall in the category of targeted display ads or retargeting ads as they are often served to specific audiences based on demographic, location, or search history.
6 Targeted Display Tactics That Bring Results
As we discussed, targeted display advertising is a B2C marketing strategy that displays relevant banner ads to a potential customer by following the user where they are. Most display campaigns are designed to target or retarget specific audience groups based on location, demographic, and search behavior.
Placing your ads in front of the audience you are targeting happens through a variety or more frequently, a combination of the following tactics:
- Geo-Fencing. A virtual fence is placed around a specific location to target mobile users visiting this area for up to 30 days.
- Addressable Geo-Fencing. Based on particular audience topics like “families with pets in Jackson, MS”, this tactic provides us with a number of homes that fall into this audience category. A geo-fence is then created around the available property line, allowing us to target mobile users who enter this address zone.
- Site Retargeting. Following your audience based on browsing history, site retargeting serves ads to users who have already visited your site.
- Keyword Contextual Search Retargeting. Using intent data like keyword searches to target users, search retargeting allows us to serve ads to individuals who have actively searched a select segment of keywords, increasing the likelihood of conversion.
- Category Contextual Retargeting. This tactic allows you to display your ad on pages relevant to your audience, narrowing down over 300 categories, for example, “music, agriculture, fashion”.
- CRM Retargeting. Serve your offline customer base relevant ads through CRM retargeting to enhance your audience list.
Want to learn more about these targeted display tactics before launching your next marketing campaign. Our team at WAY Nation Solutions are experts at combining these approaches to fulfill a robust marketing strategy unique to your business needs.
Do Targeted Display ads work?
According to Insider Intelligence, “four-fifths of consumers are more likely to make purchases when a brand gives them a personalized experience,” and that while consumers are growing more and more frustrated at impersonal ads, “the demand for personalized content is at an all-time high.” Personalization or relevancy is determined by consistent trends in data that tell us more about your particular audience than a survey or poll possibly could. The data collected ties together your product, business, or market, into the web of research that your customer base is already conducting.
When it comes to determining whether your targeted display campaign is gaining the right traction, there are several factors that allow us to measure ROI:
- Impressions. Easily the largest brand awareness metric, impressions indicate the number of times your ads have appeared on a publisher site. A good impression share is critical for measuring the effectiveness of your ad.
- Clicks. Metric that tells us how many viewers clicked through to your website, promo, or branding ad.
- View-throughs. Number of viewers who saw your ad, didn’t click through, but later visited your website as a new user.
- Digital Lift. After an ad has been live for 90 days, this metric allows us to determine the likelihood of someone having visited your site after seeing your display ads.
- Foot-traffic attribution. Using location data, marketers can measure the conversion rate between in-bound customers who were served display ads vs. those who were not.
IS CTR IMPORTANT?
The average Click Through Rate (CTR) for Targeted Display campaigns that WAY Nation Solution runs is around .15%, which may not sound very impressive. And to be honest, it isn’t. But, you know what? Your CTR doesn’t matter. In fact, a recent article from SEO experts Moz, further highlights why CTR isn’t necessarily the best metric when looking at the success of a Targeted Display campaign. Using data from a published study, they found that 33 percent of people are likely to make a purchase as a direct result of seeing a banner ad, and 44 percent of those consumers did so without clicking on the banner. CTR does not consider the numerous people who may see an ad, take action later, but never click on it.
Targeted display banners have two main purposes: (1) to increase brand awareness and (2) to drive traffic to your website or physical location. They rarely result in a “direct” conversion, but they do play a major role in influencing online (and offline) purchasing decisions. That’s why they should be included as part of any robust business marketing strategy.
Learn More
Learn more about how Targeted Display and all of our Digital Marketing Solutions by contacting us today.