Digital Media News

The online world of advertising as we used to know it has changed over the recent decades. Where banner ads used to earn about a 44% CTR, today, these ads have to work much harder if they want to get the attention of an audience, and convince that audience to progress into action. Although trying out new creative solutions and thinking outside of the box with your banner creations can help, one of the best solutions for developing successful banner ads lies within the welcoming arms of Google Analytics.

If you've been spending your advertising budget on just about any kind of advertising, then one of the most important things you'll need to ensure that you're not simply wasting your money, is follow and analyze the performance of those ads. Although you may not necessarily make your banner ads directly through Google analytics, you can use those analytics to improve the banner creatives you do create, and increase your chances of click-through and conversions.

If you know how to use it, advertisement retargeting can be a valuable and powerful resource in drawing consumers back to your website if they weren't ready to buy the first time they visited. Usually, people like to click around different websites and do some comparison shopping before they make a final decision about their purchase, and retargeting helps to increase the chance that when your potential customers are ready to buy - it's you that they'll come back to.

Retargeting campaigns rely on browser cookies to work, allowing them to create an anonymous list of the people that visit your website so that they can be targeted with ads as they move through their online experience. Because retargeting ensures you only deliver advertisements to people who have already visited your site, you can usually save money, and ensure your brand remains fresh in the minds of your prospects.

Unfortunately, not everyone will find that their retargeting campaign is an instant success. There are plenty of reasons why your strategy may fail to hit its mark, leaving you to wonder where all of those conversions have gone. If your retargeting campaign just hasn't worked out the way you had hoped - the following four reasons may explain why.

Knowing how to creatively market your brand, company, or product is an essential part of establishing success online today. As more businesses than ever before continue to migrate onto the Internet for a chance to get their hands on brand new clients, customers, and audiences, it's down to you to make sure that you're adapting to the latest methods of ensuring that your company stands out from the crowd.

The word "dynamic" shows up pretty frequently online today, from dynamic search engine advertisements, to dynamic retargeting and dynamic creative. The concept that we will be focusing on here is Dynamic creative - an advertising method that allows creatives to change automatically according to information about the user. In simple terms, dynamic advertisements use this creative form to adapt based on the wants and needs of the particular person viewing them. The information used could be related to the customer's location, behavior, or context, but the aim remains the same - to offer a personalized experience.

If you own or run a business, then it’s only right that you should use online advertising. While referrals, organic search traffic and growing popularity with your brand will bring in customers, it’s never wise to rely solely on them. For some businesses, they boast about their lack of advertising spend like it’s a badge of honor. Put simply, ‘natural’ revenue can’t be depended on.

Online advertising can yield a huge ROI, but there are a number of things to be aware of before creating your first campaign. Initially, since there are loads of places to buy ads, it’s important to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. And that’s in relation to your target customers, not someone else’s.

More transparent than print, more potential to go viral than banners and non-disruptive to users, "native advertising" is a term every marketers knows. But do they all understand? them?

Broadly speaking, native advertising is a form of online advertising. More specifically, it’s advertising that seeks to provide content in the context of the user’s experience. For example, a sponsored Tweet on Twitter, a suggested post on Facebook or one of those full-page ads between Flipboard pages.

Native advertising as a technique is great because the quality and scalability of it means that it’s filling the gap between brand publishing and banner adverts. We now live and operate in a content-heavy world, so native advertising offers advertisers a degree of flexibility.

The era of the “one size fits all” ad creative is over. In case you somehow missed it, there has been a major shift from the old model of display advertising, which depended on advertisers distributing generic content everywhere in the hope of reaching their target audience, to highly personalized content within dynamic ads delivered directly to pre-targeted consumers on whatever device they happen to be using. Learn more about implementing dynamic ads in our brochure.

What has fueled the shift?

Advancements in technology and data capture have fueled the shift - providing online advertisers with access to detailed information on target audiences such as their location, interests, environment and even their preferred ways of communicating with brands. Marketers are now able to turn data into actionable information in real-time, for example, by segmenting audiences and brands while simultaneously considering weather, location, date and time, device, and more.

Negative advertising or “poisoning the well” is the practice of attacking a competitor or opponent to make yourself look more credible. The logic behind the practice is that if the other party's reputation is damaged, you end up looking better. While poisoning the well is de rigeur in political advertising, businesses also use it as a part of their overall advertising strategy. It’s particularly popular in the tech industry, where rivalries tend to run deep. This smear tactic technique is also frequently used by a second or third tier competitor as a way to try to tarnish the market leader’s image. Below outlines a couple google examples of negative advertising.

Scroogled (Courtesy of Microsoft)