FUNDAMENTALS OF DIGITAL MARKETING: MODULE 19/26

Deep dive into display advertising

1. Making display ads meet your goals

Key Learnings
From the start, you should design your display advertising campaigns to help you
achieve your goals. Here we'll go over some of the many things display advertising
can do for you, including: * making a great first impression * moving customers
through the sales funnel * turning interested people into paying customers.

Video Transcript
Hi! If display advertising sounds like something that might be interesting to you,
before you start, it’s important to understand what display does well and decide
what your goals are. This can not only help you set the right expectations, it can
also help you focus and get the biggest benefit for your business.
So, what are you hoping to do with display advertising?
Get your name out to people who might not know about you? Tell existing
customers something new about your business? Bring customers back again and
again? You can use display advertising to do all these things, but it helps to decide
what makes sense for you and then build your display advertising campaigns
around those goals.
If you have lots of goals, a single ad or a single campaign can’t do it all. But don’t
worry. If you clearly lay out what you want to achieve up front, you can then build
out different adverts targeting different people for all the right reasons.
A simple way to break down what you want to achieve with display advertising is
to think about the different steps of the customer journey as a funnel. The widest
part at the top is awareness.
Let’s go back to our film podcast example. Before you can turn people into
subscribers, they need to know you’re there. Display advertising can help you here,
giving you a way to reach a broad target audience.
So if building awareness of your business is a goal, you’ll want to target a broad
audience and use adverts that make a great first impression.
This is a good time to think about what might catch someone’s attention -
remember, they’re not actively searching for you when your adverts show up.
Is your film podcast the most popular one online? Do you feature exclusive
interviews with the best directors? These could be great attention-getters. You can
even consider giving film fans a taste of your brilliant content in a rich media video
advert.
See how setting your goals can help guide you as you build out your display
advertising campaigns?
OK, let’s keep going. The next stage in the funnel is all about shaping people’s
opinions of you, and making sure that they remember you in the future when they
want what you’re selling.
So if this is one of your goals, you can create new display advertising campaigns
that use messaging to reinforce your competitive advantages and really highlight
the benefits of whatever product or service you offer.
At this point, you might narrow down your audience a bit more to include people
who have been to your site before, or maybe people who are really interested in the
products and services you offer.
Next on the sales “funnel”, is to focus on people who are already considering the
solution you’re offering. Here, you might really refine your message, zeroing in on
what exactly makes your product or service so great.
So for your film podcast, you could talk about how many subscribers you have, or
use testimonials from happy customers. Remember, you won’t be targeting
everyone with this message...these adverts will be limited to people who you know
have been looking into you.
The last step in the sales funnel is the purchase. If your ultimate goal is to get
people to become paying customers, you need to focus on conversion. For
example, you can use adverts with special offers or incentives targeted at people
who you know have shown interest in your podcast, but who haven’t become
subscribers.
Retargeting is especially useful at this point in the funnel. Remember, you want to
target people that you know have been researching you online, and get them to
consider you and eventually convert. Well, retargeting is a way to accomplish that.
It lets you show adverts to people after they visit your website, or do specific
things that indicate their interest.
Say someone visited your podcast’s website after spotting an ad, looked at some
pages, and even made it all the way to the subscription page — but they didn’t
quite make the final leap.
With retargeting campaigns, you can define these “near misses” as your target
audience.
Then, you can show this very specific audience adverts to help entice them back to
your site. This time, they might visit your site and finish that subscription form.
Just like that, you’ve got yourself a new customer!
Defining exactly what you want to get out of your display advertising will help you
create campaigns that are focused on your different business goals. So whether
you want more people to know about your business or you’d like to turn more
visitors into paying customers, display advertising can help.

2. Understanding ad networks

Key Learnings
Advertising networks connect large groups of websites offering advertising space
with people who want to advertise on them. This video examines: * how websites
and businesses work together * common things advertising networks do.

Video Transcript
Hi! Well, you’ve seen all those display ads all over the Internet, and by now, you’ve
hopefully got a pretty good understanding of how they work. Now, you might want
to start thinking about where you want your ads to appear. But how do you find
websites with advertising space to sell? And how do you connect with them? Well,
that’s where display advertising networks come in.
Display advertising networks are like a middleman, connecting businesses who
want to advertise, with websites with ad space to sell. Now, let’s find out how they
can help your business find, and advertise on, the right websites for you.
Let’s go back to our film review podcast. Say you found a specific website you
wanted to advertise your podcast on. Well, you have a few options here. First, you
could contact the site directly to work out the details, and that’s certainly
something that happens. But with all the websites out there that offer advertising
opportunities, you can imagine this can get pretty time consuming. This is where
display advertising networks come in. They handle both the buying and the selling
of display ads, linking businesses to websites that want to sell advertising space.
Another way to think of it is as a marketplace that brings businesses and websites
together, helping manage the transactions. There are quite a few of these
networks out there, like Google Display Network or Yahoo, and they all offer
different features, but there’s a few things most all of them have in common.
First and foremost, they all offer businesses looking to advertise ad space on
websites.
Websites that offer these ad spaces can become a part of these networks, and
they can do things like set minimum prices for how much money they expect for
showing ads.
Your business can then bid for the spots you want throughout all the websites in
that network, deciding how much you’re willing to pay. Buyers and sellers are
connected every single time pages are loaded, and the ads that win the right to fill
the ad spot are shown.
Of course, each network has its own rules, its own features and its own processes
and bidding systems, but the key is that they all match buyers and sellers to fill
available ad spots.
Networks can also help you target specific audiences through two main routes:
the topics of the web pages where the ads appear, and general information about
the people viewing the content. While the exact criteria you can use to find your
audience, or the way you actually go about running your campaign, could vary from
network to network, targeting is essential to get your ads in front of the right
people.
Another thing networks do is handle the money involved. Buying and selling ads
happens every second of every day, and the networks collect money from
businesses and pay the websites that show the ads.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, advertising networks collect and share data
with businesses.
They can tell you how many times your ads are shown, how many times they’re
clicked on, how much they cost you, where they’ve been showing up, and how all
of this varies between the websites and audiences you’re targeting. Many
networks even let you add tracking to your web pages so you can see if your ads
are resulting in conversions on your website.
If you want to use display advertising to promote your business across the web,
advertising networks are a great place to start. They’ll bring you together with the
websites that want to sell you ad space. They’ll let you decide where your ads will
be seen, and who will see them. They’ll manage the money for everyone involved.
They’ll even provide you the data you need to know just how well your campaign is
getting on.

3. How retargeting works

Key Learnings
Retargeting allows you to advertise to groups of visitors to your website based on
the things they did when they visited. Here we'll cover the basics: * tracking what
people do on your site * using that information to identify people you want to
target * creating ads specifically for those people.

Video Transcript
Hey there! One really powerful type of display advertising is called retargeting, and
lets you use what people do on your website in order to target them with a specific
advertising message, even after they’ve left. In this video we’ll show you how it
works, and help you decide if retargeting is right for your digital strategy.
Let’s use our example of a film review podcast once more. A potential customer
comes across your website searching for something new to listen to on their
morning commute. They are interested and start to subscribe, but halfway through
filling out the subscription form are suddenly distracted by phone call. So they
leave your site before hitting “Subscribe”.
While you’re probably glad they visited your website, you’d be happier if they had
finished subscribing. They might forget about your podcast. Or find something
else to subscribe to instead.
Here’s where retargeting comes in.
Your first step in re-targeting is to define your target audience.
There are lots of retargeting solutions out there to choose from, and many display
networks offer this feature as well. But no matter which you use, you’ll first need to
define who will be in your audience.
So, you could define your target audience as people who started to fill out a
subscription form, but didn’t complete it.
Your retargeting service might need you to add a little code to your web pages, or
integrate it in your web analytics tool, so it can start collecting a list of people from
your website who match this criteria.
Again, this won’t be a list of individual people with any personal information, such
as names or email addresses. Instead, it’s an anonymous list (often called a
retargeting list) of users that match your criteria who can be retargeted with ads.
So, now that you’ve defined an audience, any visitor who started to subscribe but
didn’t finish will be added to the list. Now it’s time to create ads specifically for
them.
These ads can be pretty focused, because you know everyone seeing them has
already started to subscribe on your website. So you might include things like
special offers for extra content, a free gift for signing up, or some other incentive
that’s aimed at getting them to come back and finish subscribing.
With a campaign set up to show ads to people on the retargeting list, you can now
reach potential customers even after they’ve left your site.
So later on they might see one of your ads, click on it, and finish signing up.
Once they’ve subscribed, there’s no need to show them ads with subscription
incentives anymore. So you might want to create a new retargeting list for current
subscribers. Then, you can target them with a different ad campaign, perhaps
convincing them to come back and explore all the other podcasts on offer!
So that’s how retargeting works. It tracks what people do on your website and then
creates an audience based on their actions, letting advertisers design specific ads
for people who have - or haven’t - done specific things.
Hopefully this sparks some ideas of how you might be able to use retargeting for
your own business to re-engage visitors, turn them into customers, and bring them
back again and again!