Digital Media News

Advertising makes up a crucial part of developing a successful online presence and bringing in new revenue. Any thriving marketing expert or publisher must employ an effective ad operations company if they want to make sure that everything continues to go smoothly with their future strategy. However, although some people already know how important ad operations may be, others are left wondering what it's actually for.

Ad operations teams work with online and digital strategies to help publishers manage their advertising campaigns and maximize potential revenue. Digital advertisers may offer anything from display advertising in the form of rich media and banner advertising, to search marketing, text advertising, mobile ads, and video advertising. So once you've established just how important ad operations actually are to your business, how do you ensure that you can keep your team happy?

Once you have established a sound online advertising campaign strategy by setting up your social media profiles, creating content for your website, optimizing your website's infrastructure and content for the search engines, you should start seeing a significant increase in traffic within the first few weeks. However, what really counts when it comes to website traffic is not numbers alone - the quality of this traffic is what's important. You could have a thousand unique visitors per day, but if you are only generating one lead or getting one sale per day on average, your marketing efforts clearly aren't achieving much. In order to make your increasing visitor numbers count for something, you will need to take every step that you can to increase conversions. Converting as many visitors to your website into leads or paying customers is the ultimate key to success rather than sheer numbers alone. 

Online advertising tends to be one of those things that you either get right spectacularly well, or horribly wrong. Banner ads perhaps represent this situation perfectly. Online advertising and banner ads enjoy their fair share of trends and it’s important to keep up to date with what’s hot and what’s not. Having said that, there are 5 staple bits of information about banner ads that will stand the test of time.

1. Make sure that your banner ads are laser-targeted.

It’s common sense, yet a common mistake. There’s no point creating a banner ad if it’s not going to reach your target market. Therefore, picking which websites your banner ad sits on is crucial. Do some research!

Advertising online can really boost the bottom line of your business because of the reach of the Internet. Across the globe, we all use the Internet and access content. And not only is your net of potential customers vast, but the Internet also allows you to reach your leads instantly. There’s zero lead-time in the digital world.

Make sure that you accurately measure your online advertising campaigns and embrace an interactive approach to business. With the Internet, you can get instant feedback from the public on your marketing ideas. That feedback could be in the shape of an online form, a survey or a conversation on a social media platform. Either way, use this as a bonus opportunity to grab an email address and market future products and services to your audience.

Be better at online media buying. That isn't just friendly advice, it's essential if you want to get your hands on a piece of success. You might have a great display advertising campaign in the works, but that doesn't mean you won't be searching for ways to enhance your tactics for direct-response. Buying display ads, banners and/or text can be a fantastic way to engage customers.

The way that you manage your campaign is up to you. You may focus your advertising scheme to be oriented to direct-response, including product sales and lead generation. On the other hand, you may focus your advertising completely on branding, in an attempt to build name recognition and brand awareness over time.

Despite best efforts, discrepancies in statistics are still quite a big issue for advertisers and publishers or between the advertiser’s statistics and the advertising platform's statistics. Typically, discrepancies of up to 10% can be acceptable; however, at times they can reach 20% and more. There are many different reasons why discrepancies occur. For example, counting methodologies can differ between parties, as each party can potentially count an impression at a slightly different point in the delivery of an ad (i.e. publishers can count impressions at the time the ad request is sent, while advertisers can count an impression when the creative/ad is delivered).

One thing to take into consideration is that before investigating any discrepancies always ask for most granular 3rd party report (e.g. hourly or at least daily). If discrepancies occur very suddenly, always check if anything was changed in campaign setup, (e.g. new creative added, new inventory sources added etc.).

When you set a budget and launch a campaign, the campaign bids on auctions based on a number of factors. It proceeds to bid in auctions until it reaches that budget; it then stops bidding in auctions. As an advertiser, you would like your creatives to be viewed by users evenly over the course of a day (or a specified period in a day) to increase your chances of reaching the most possible potential customers, but budgeting alone does not account for this concept.

Retargeting is a powerful digital marketing technique that can improve brand recall and revenue. Retargeting drives potential customers back to your website by targeting users who have previously visited your website but didn't make a purchase or take a desired action. While retargeting can be an extremely effective, high-ROI solution, if you make a mistake, it can leave you worse off than you started.

Avoid these fivecommon retargeting mistakes , and you’ll be sure to reap the rewards of a successful retargeting campaign.

When you want to engage consumers and build brand awareness, there’s no denying the impact of video advertising. By connecting the power of sight, sound and motion you’re onto a winning formula that can captivate your audience and filter out some of the other digital distractions that people are faced with every day.  What’s more, if you go viral you’ll be onto something huge that could transform your business.

The proof is in the stats. YouTube receives more than 1 billion unique visitors every month and they’re watching more than 6 billion hours of video. Between mid-2012 and mid-2013, mobile video advertising grew by 1,260% to roughly $40 million, and video’s share of online and mobile display has grown by 50% to 18%.