However great your business and products are, you aren’t going to make much money if customers can’t find you and contact you. Every day in the UK, there are millions of potential customers out there browsing the internet – wouldn’t it be great if you could get a message in front of these customers and encourage them to click through into your website? There is, and it’s known as Display Advertising.
Display Adverts are also sometimes called banner ads, and are a very effective way of prominently showing your message to potential customers. Display ads increase awareness of your business, products, and services, and can encourage people who have previously visited your website to come back when they are ready to make a purchase.
Display adverts are highly effective, so it’s perhaps no surprise that around 40% of all spending on digital advertising goes on display ads. In 2019, display ad spending rose 17% to a total of £6,200 million.
What is Display Advertising?
Display advertising is a combination of text with images, graphics, video, and other components to create online adverts. The adverts are then slotted into various websites, encouraging viewers to click through to the advertiser’s website. They might be encouraged to interact with the advert, make a purchase, sign up for an email list or make an appointment. Many advertisers will use promotional networks for publishing ads, and any website signed up to the network might show their ads.
Using Visual Display Advertising
Display advertising is by nature very visual. They attract attention, and display adverts can be classed into three broad categories:
- Brand awareness – the advert is a way of getting your company known or keeping its profile high.
- Acquisition – These adverts encourage immediate action such as encouraging people to click, sign up, or “buy now”.
- Retargeting – These adverts are designed to reach people who have already been to your site once, and encourage them to return.
How Display Advertising Works
There are two separate ways of buying display ads. These are:
- CPM or “cost per impression” – you are charged each time the ad is displayed.
- CPC or “cost per click” – you are only charged when someone sees your banner ad and then goes on to click on it.
Display adverts can also use cookies collected on other websites to give clues about what sort of content browsers are interested in and where in the world they are located. This information will allow you to target a specific audience with your adverts to maximize impact. Targeting in this way allows you to place adverts for your target market on websites they are likely to be interested in. Display ads can be placed in this way on blogs, news sites, editorial content, or social media.
Types of Display Advertising
There isn’t just one type of display advertising – there are lots of things you can try to attract new visitors to your site. These include:
- Banner ads – these are the strips of advertising at the top of a website, or down the sides of the page. They are usually very image-rich.
- Rich media – this term describes adverts that require some sort of interactivity or user participation. Viewers can both click on your ad or interact with it.
- Native ads – these ads are less obvious and are designed to appear as part of the website they are displayed on.
Benefits of Display Advertising
Marketers have found many benefits in using display advertising on their websites. These will be different for every organization, but the main advantages are:
- Flexibility – You have a creative scope to choose the style of advert that best suits your needs, organization, and product.
- Targeting – If you’re smart with your targeting, it guarantees that only people who are genuinely interested in your product will see the advert. This makes it a more effective use of a limited advertising budget.
- Reach – display ads can be placed onto a wide range of popular websites, and might appear in a range of ways.
- Effectiveness – analytics tools allow you to monitor how well your campaign is performing. You can easily review which ads are performing well, and quickly tweak those which aren’t doing as well.
- Awareness – Display ads create awareness and desire for your products. Other adverts are only displayed when customers have already searched for your products.
If you are interested in the benefits of Display Advertising then please get in touch to see what we can offer.
