10 Digital Display Advertising Tips

Digital display advertising is one of the most frequently used promotional tools by a wide range of businesses to promote their products or services on the web. Banners are the most important feature of this form of internet advertising and it’s important that they are of the best quality and are targeted at your audiences.

To improve your digital display advertising and boost sales or leads for your business, I’ve listed here 10 tips that I’ve found very useful that will help your marketing strategy:

1. Add a call to action (CTA)

It always surprises me how many advertisers leave out a call to action on their banners. A CTA leads to higher click through rates (CTR) because it makes it easy for people to understand what you want them to do on your website – like purchase, download, signup, register, contact us etc. However, your CTA should be strong and include a benefit that is of interest to your target audience and you should avoid something like ‘Click Here’.

2. Raise brand awareness

Banners are effective at raising brand awareness for your business, products, services or personal brand. Because of their wide reach and combination of text, colours, graphics and animation you can create a lasting impression for your brand that you can reinforce each time your target audience sees your banners.

3. Create multiple size banners

The more banner sizes you have, the more people you can reach. Most sites and app placements only accept specific banner sizes and if you don’t have them, then you will not be able to advertise on these sites. The main banner sites accepted on the Google Display Network are:

• Vertical rectangle: 240 x 400
• Mobile leaderboard: 320 x 50
• Banner: 468 x 60
• Leaderboard: 728 x 90
• Square: 250 x 250
• Small square: 200 x 200
• Large rectangle: 336 x 280
• Inline rectangle: 300 x 250
• Skyscraper: 120 x 600
• Wide skyscraper: 160 x 600
• Half-page: 300 x 600
• Large leaderboard: 970 x 90
• Large mobile banner: 320 x 100
• Billboard: 970 x 250
• Portrait: 300 x 1050
And each banner should be no larger than 150KB. Also, the file type formats accepted are JPG, GIF, PNG and JPEG.

4. Create a display network campaign

There are many networks that you can join to advertise your business with banner ads, but the Google Display Network (GDN) is one of the leading ones and it has millions of websites and apps that have joined its Adsense programme that you can advertise on. So the audience you can reach is in the billions and it’s an inexhaustible resource to promote your business and website.

5. Choose placements carefully

There are a wide range of placements to choose from on GDN and not all of them will be good for your website. Google allows you to choose which content placements you want and some that you might want to avoid are:
• Death and tragedy sites
• Sexually suggestive sites
• Sites with profanity and rough language
• And military and international conflict sites
These types of placements and content could damage your brand and you may want to exclude them if it is a real concern for your business.

6. Test banners

Create at least two banners for each size, with slightly different features, benefits and messages to test what people respond to. This is known as split testing and looking at your Click Through Rate (CTR) for each banner will inform you which are the better ones. However, you should ensure that you receive sufficient traffic volumes for your banners to ensure that you can base your decision on sufficient data. Also, conversion rate data will also help to identify the better ads and you can then adjust them accordingly.

7. Match your branding

Matching your brand identity on all banners you create is important to promoting your business effectively and achieving high brand recall. So your brand name, colours, tag line, logo, positioning and messages should be consistent on your website, banners, offline advertising and anywhere else your target markets come in contact with your business.

8. Add offers and discounts

To increase CTR and purchases on your site, make sure you add any offers, discounts in your banners. These are effective incentives and you should test them too, to see which ones are the best for your business.

9. Turn off mobile app placements

App placements are ineffective for many advertisers simply because mobile screen sizes are small and as people scroll on their devices, they mistakenly click on ads. And this is one reason why conversion rates are very low on these devices. On the Display Network, you can turn these off if you’ve reviewed your traffic and seen that they are not converting or even before you run any ads.

10. Landing pages

Send prospects to landing pages that are related to the messages and offers they’ve seen on your banners. This helps to reduce bounce rates and improves conversions for your business. Also, the home page is usually not the best place to send them and an inner page is often better because it will be more relevant with the communication in the banner.

Summary

Need help with digital display advertising on the web for your business? Contact me to discuss your requirements and to find out more about advertising management services.