Digital display advertising spend is increasing exponentially, growing by over 32% in 2013, with predicted growth of over 21% between 2014-2016, overtaking search by 2015. It’s extraordinary, but not surprising, given changing behaviours in consuming content online and the growth of mobile.
But with the average click-through rate of traditional static digital display advertising being less than 0.1% and search still the most effective and the emergence of native advertising as an effective, digital display is in danger of failing despite its ubiquity.
There’s no doubt that when planned and executed well, digital display can drive brilliant results. However with so many agencies and brands seeing the campaign element of their digital spend as an afterthought, it’s often not driving the results that it deserves. If you want to drive ROI and great brand engagement through your digital display campaigns, here are the top 5 things you should be considering:
- Make sure your customers see your ad
It sounds simple, but not targeting digital display campaigns is one of the main reasons that there’s such a low click-through rate. According to Comscore, most campaigns are only seen by 30% of their target audience because they don’t even scroll down the page. Guaranteeing your ad placement, as well as targeting your campaign to appear on relevant sites, can make a huge difference to engagement rates.
- Make it part of a larger campaign
The best digital display advertising integrates with other campaign elements. Whether it’s above the line, or other digital campaign elements, like a micro site, creating a larger story that includes your digital display can be really effective.
- Great creative
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a standalone campaign, or part of a lager integrated strategy, you have to deliver great creative. So often, we see a re-hash of a print ad, with little animation, uninspiring, to say the least. And that’s the point, you want users to be inspired to take notice of your campaign, so make the effort to think about the execution and include the next point in your thinking…
- Give site users something
As we outlined in our recent article, you have to give your users something in order for them to interact with your display ad…
- Test and re-test
The great thing about digital display ads, is that you can check how they’re going in real time, changing placement, even execution to get the right results. Through real-time bidding, marketers can also display targeted and individually generated ads, perhaps showing products they have saved for later, or products that are compatible with previous purchases.Insist on visibility of your analytics, stay close to your digital agency and together you can deliver ever improving results.
