If you want to generate more business, don’t overlook Pay-Per-Click (PPC) as a part of your digital marketing strategy. While many businesses only dabble in text advertisements, we recommend a more comprehensive strategy for PPC campaigns, starting with display ads. We’ll give you 5 types of display advertising techniques that your business can leverage for more leads and sales.
What is Display Advertising?
Display advertising is a form of digital advertising that uses photos, videos, logos or other graphics and rich media to entice users to click and be taken to a landing page. The idea is that using more than just text will get your ad noticed among the competition, engage the potential buyer and get them to your site to take an action (either fill in a form or make a purchase). Many marketers like to use these ads to increase brand awareness and re-engage with users who have previously visited a website.
How Does Display Advertising Work?
These ads usually target people with specific traits and characteristics to increase the chance of ad clicks and conversions. Unlike normal text ads that appear in the search results, display ads can appear on different websites in many different sizes and formats.
Misconceptions About Display Advertising
Many digital marketers are still skeptical about the benefits of display advertising and believe that display ad campaigns will burn through your budget quickly without any conversions to show for it. Yes, this can happen with display ads. But if you use them correctly, display advertising can be a very powerful asset in addition to typical search advertising campaigns.
We’ll show you how with 5 types of display advertising.
Types of Display Advertising for More Leads and Sales
There will be cases where you’ll hit a ceiling when trying to increase site visitors via search. This is where display ads can jump in to give a hefty boost to your site traffic.
Here are five different types of display advertising campaigns you can start using today to expand your brand reach and grow your business.
1. Remarketing
The most common type of display advertising is remarketing. Remarketing (or retargeting), is a very powerful technique that allows you to reconnect with your past website visitors. Remarketing campaigns are generally very successful campaigns and can greatly increase your ROI.
How to Set Up a Remarketing Ad
- You’ll need to add a snippet of code (provided by AdWords) across all pages of your website.
- Next, you’ll create remarketing lists, which are specific segments of your website visitors that you can target with remarketing ads. For example, you can create a list for visitors who saw a specific product or category page.
- Finally, you can create a remarketing campaign within AdWords with various ads targeting each of your list.
And that’s it! Now whenever users visit your site and leave, they will continue to see your brand, which builds trust and exposure, increasing the chance of a purchase.
2. Target by Website Placement
This is generally the safest and most effective targeting option for display ads because it lets you choose which websites to place your ads on, rather than letting Google select the “best” sites for you.
For example, if you sell sports equipment, then selecting sites related to sports would be your first inclination towards reaching interesting buyers.
If you’re unsure which sites to target, you can set the campaign to automatically target all sites, then check the specific sites that google placed your ads on. You can also exclude sites not related to your business.
3. Target by Interest
This option allows you to target visitors based on Google’s interest categories. The two types of interest targeting are: in-market audiences and affinity audiences.
In-market audiences are people looking to buy a product or service very soon. Google knows when people are actively in the market for a specific category of products or services based on their search history and social activity.
For example, people who are reading car review sites, searching for local car dealerships, and using price calculators would send a strong signal to Google that they in the market for a car.
Affinity audiences is a broader option that targets users who aren’t in research mode. In this case, Google will place users in “long-term interest” categories by analyzing their profile, overall interests, passions and lifestyle.
A good example of this would be someone who constantly reads an automotive blog they subscribed to or check out websites on car trends. This would signal Google to place you in the “Auto Enthusiasts” affinity audience available in Google AdWords.
4. Contextual Targeting
Contextual targeting is a form of display advertising that uses keywords to find relevant website to show to show your ads on.
Using keywords in display campaigns works a bit differently than using them in display ads. When you enter keywords in a display campaign, Google will scan the content of all web pages and select the ones that are relevant to them.
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5. Topic Targeting
Topic targeting allows you choose specific topics of web pages to display your online ads on. Google will then select web pages related to your chosen topics to match with your ads.
For instance, a car dealership may want to select the “Autos & Vehicles” topic so that their display ads will be shown on any web page related to cars. If they wanted to further narrow the targeting, they can also choose subtopics such as Vehicle Brands, Trucks & SUVs, or Commercial Vehicles.
We hope these tips will be useful in starting your display advertising campaign. If you have a specific question on PPC or digital marketing, drop your thoughts in the comments below! Or, you could schedule a free consultation with us.
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Kai enjoys innovating marketing strategies and staring endlessly at spreadsheets of complex data. In his free time, he enjoys movies, eating raw organic foods, and reading tech news.
This is really fantastic, thanks Kai!