Display Advertising in Digital Marketing: Enhance your online presence

In the fast-paced world of Digital Marketing, “Expanding Reach with Display Advertising” has emerged as a powerful strategy to elevate brand visibility, engage audiences, and drive conversions. Display advertising, an essential component of SEO, enables businesses to showcase their products and services through eye-catching visual ads across various online platforms. Unlike traditional text-based ads, display ads utilise compelling images, videos, and interactive elements to capture the attention of target audiences.

In this article, we delve into the significance of display advertising in Marketing, exploring how it allows businesses to reach a wider audience, create impactful brand experiences, and achieve remarkable results in their digital marketing campaigns. Join us on this journey to unravel the potential of display advertising as a dynamic tool to expand reach, foster meaningful connections, and thrive in the competitive landscape of online marketing.

What is Display Advertising?

Display advertising, or display marketing, refers to visual ads on the Internet. These ads typically feature images, videos, and GIFs.

Google display ads appear across the entire Google Display Network, meaning they can appear on various websites where your target audience may already be browsing the internet.

Outside of Google Ads, you can create display ads on other platforms, such as Facebook Ads Manager. Facebook’s advertising platform allows you to create display ads that will appear across the Facebook Audience Network of partner apps and websites. Similarly, you can run TikTok ad campaigns via TikTok Ads Manager.

When using the display ad format with YouTube advertising, your display ad will appear next to the platform’s video player.

Also Read: Influencer Marketing Impact on Marketing: Boosting Your Brand Online

Why use Display Advertising?

With internet use increasing daily – there are now over 4.66 billion internet users worldwide – it is no surprise that the internet is one of the best places to advertise your business.

The digital age has allowed people to shop online with a few clicks without leaving the house. As a result, using display advertising can be a powerful way to reach your target audience.

By allowing your business to appear where your audience is already active online, display advertising can do things search cannot. Because the Google Display Network is so vast, engaging in display marketing can be risky for your business — if you’re not careful, you can potentially waste a lot of ad spend with display advertising.

However, display advertising has many benefits, and if you are confident in it, you can transform your PPC strategy.

Display ads have the potential to significantly improve your brand awareness thanks to their eye-catching visual format. With display marketing, you can strengthen brand consistency and visibility, nurture leads, track performance, and support the success of your other PPC activity – to name just a few of the benefits.

Strengthen Brand Consistency and Visibility

People say a picture speaks a thousand words, and when it comes to display advertising, we couldn’t agree more.

One of the things we love most about display advertising is the visual format. The display ad format lets you get creative with colours, text, video, audio, and rich media, all while incorporating the latest design trends. This is key to brand visibility and ensuring your ad stands out in a positive light.

By using your brand colour palette and styling guide, you can create ads that are instantly recognisable (or can become so). This, in turn, will ensure your advert stands out on the page where it’s displayed and will also strengthen your brand consistency. Such a guide is crucial whether you’re using professional video production or writing text-based digital marketing materials.

Nurture Leads and Engage New Audiences

Display marketing is an important advertising strategy for nurturing leads and increasing your conversion rate. Once a potential customer has been introduced to your products or services, a well-placed display ad can also be a great reminder to encourage them to purchase.

On the other hand, you could use display advertising to engage new audiences who may still need to become familiar with your products or services. The targeting options in display advertising seem almost endless, allowing you to carefully control who sees your ads.

With display advertising, you can target people based on topics, interest categories, placements, context, demographics, or based on custom audience information.

You can even create advantaged targeting options based on your marketing goals. This is great for reaching people who match your target audience and for re-engaging existing customers or previous visitors.

By tapping into the wide variety of targeting options offered by display advertising, you are also more likely to find customers who actively want to make a purchase and, therefore, are more likely to convert.

Track Display Advertising Performance

Display advertising also comes with tracking and analysing your advertising performance. This means future campaigns can be refined to make them even more successful.

The wealth of insights available through display advertising means you know who you target, when, and why. The Google Display Network and Facebook Advertising platforms offer detailed reports enabling you to analyse the performance of each display ad.

You can also refine where your adverts are shown based on the performance of your ad placements. If you find that a particular site is underperforming and wasting ad budget, you can add it to your exclusion list.

You are gaining a thorough understanding of your display advertising performance, and which PPC metrics you should track will enable you to make informed decisions about future ad campaigns and minimise your ad spend.

Support other PPC Advertising Activities

Digital marketing is a system of interlinking tactics.

Display advertising happily complements other forms of digital marketing and pay-per-click advertising. By using multiple forms of online advertising, you are constantly pushing your products or services and increasing your brand awareness.

Each type of advertising offers different benefits for your business, meaning it is important to consider all forms of online advertisements when creating a well-structured digital marketing campaign.

Also Read: Call-to-Action Strategies for Marketing: Engaging Your Online Audience

What is Display Marketing: The Three Types of Display Ads?

When developing a display advertising campaign, there are many display advertising strategies and formats to choose from. However, three key strategies can cover most of these advertising methods: site placement advertising, contextual advertising, and remarketing.

These display marketing strategies all have their place in any good digital marketing campaign, depending on which stage of the customer funnel they target. These display advertising formats complement each other and work together to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Here’s a quick rundown of each of the three overarching display advertising strategies:

Site Placement Advertising

This type of display advertising puts you (or the marketer working on your behalf) in control of where you want your display ads to appear. You can choose sites, pages, and apps where research shows your target audience resides.

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is based on context, meaning your brand’s ads are placed on relevant websites. If you are a hotel owner, your display ads would appear on travel websites. A clothing advertiser would be shown on fashion blogs.

The Google algorithm can use numerous sources to determine context, including keywords, linguistic page structure, audience data, and other factors. Using the keyword planner tool when designing your display ads can ensure your ads reach the right people.

Remarketing

Remarketing display ads will only appear to users who have interacted with your brand. When using remarketing display ads, you have several targeting options. For example, you could display a specific set of display ads to visitors to your website who still need to convert.

Display adverts tailored to retarget previous audiences are ads that subconsciously say, ‘Hey, you forgot to check out!’ It is an incredibly personable form of display advertising that can deliver outstanding results.

Also read: Search Engine Marketing Tools

Google Display Advertising

The biggest player in display advertising is Google. The Google Display Network currently reaches 90% of all internet users worldwide – on millions of websites, blogs, news sites, and services such as YouTube and Gmail.

The two main types of Google display ads

The two main types of Google display ads are responsive and uploaded image ads. The Google Display Network only supported basic text or image ads in several standard sizes for years.

Over the years, the number of available ad formats on the Google Display Network has increased significantly, and the introduction of responsive display ads has arguably transformed the advertising landscape for many businesses looking to promote their products and services with Google Ads.

Responsive Display Ads

Responsive display ads are the default ads for advertisers using Google Display Advertising.

With responsive display ads, you upload a selection of images or allow Google to scrape your website for suitable images and write a choice of headlines and descriptions for your ads. Google will then use these to create responsive ads for you.

Google Ads will automatically optimise your responsive display ad for performance by testing different combinations of visuals and copy to determine which ad versions perform best.

Responsive display ads typically have a lower cost-per-click (CPC) and a higher click-through rate (CTR) than uploaded image ads. However, the responsive nature of these ads means that you hand the reins over to Google and have less control over the design process.

Uploaded Image Ads

Unlike responsive display ads, uploaded image ads let you control the look and feel of your display ads.

When using standard image ads, you can create them in a design tool of your choice and then upload them to the Google Ads interface using one of the supported image file formats: JPG, PNG, or GIF.

However, it’s important to note that uploaded image ads won’t automatically resize to fit the webpage they are displayed on. Therefore, if using this display ad type, you must upload your ad in various ad sizes to ensure it is shown across different web pages.

As a result, uploaded image ads allow you to exercise greater control over the design of your display ads. However, it is a more manual process that requires you to take on the optimisation and performance of your display ads.

Standard ad sizes on Google

Variety is the spice of life when it comes to advertising on Google. There is a wide range of ad sizes to choose from, allowing you to test which format works best for your ad campaigns.

The currently supported ad sizes for Google Display ads are:

Square and rectangle ad sizes:

• 200 x 200px – Small Square
• 240 x 400px – Vertical Rectangle
• 250 x 250px – Square
• 250 x 360px – Triple Widescreen
• 300 x 250px – Inline Rectangle
• 336 x 280px – Large Rectangle
• 580 x 400px – Netboard

Skyscraper ad sizes:

• 120 x 600px – Skyscraper
• 160 x 600px – Wide Skyscraper
• 300 x 600px – Half-Page Ad
• 300 x 1050px – Portrait

Leaderboard ad sizes:

• 468 x 60px – Banner
• 728 x 90px – Leaderboard
• 930 x 180px – Top Banner
• 970 x 90px – Large Leaderboard
• 970 x 250px – Billboard
• 980 x 120px – Panorama

Mobile-only ad sizes:

• 300 x 50px – Mobile Banner
• 320 x 50px – Mobile Leaderboard
• 320 x 100px – Large Mobile Banner

When uploading your standard image ads for use on the Google Display Network, make sure you upload them in multiple sizes so they are displayed across different mobile and desktop placements.

Targeted display ads use banners (static images, videos, and HTML5). Banner ads come in various sizes and are used to display advertising on millions of websites and apps as users browse the web. Media advertising can be shown on both desktop and mobile devices.

Targeted display advertising is a type of digital marketing that targets potential customers based on a broad set of variables such as demographics, online habits, and interests.

Unlike other types of digital advertising, targeted advertising is most often paid on a CPM (cost per mill) model, allowing advertisers to pay for many impressions at once.

Why is Display Advertising Important?: A Wrap-Up

Hopefully, this article has answered your questions about “what is display advertising and why is it important?” and reminded you of its importance in your wider digital marketing efforts.

Display advertising is a fantastic way to increase brand awareness and convert leads into sales in a customizable, personable, and entirely responsive way.

If you are looking to level up your display advertising campaigns, we are here to help. Growing your online business is important, and here at Common Ground, we will leverage our proven frameworks and PPC expertise to deliver measurable results.

Also Read: 6 Best Audience Intelligence Tools For Customer Insights

Conclusion

In conclusion, “Expanding Reach with Display Advertising in Digital Marketing” opens a world of possibilities for businesses seeking to make a lasting impact in the digital sphere. Display advertising offers a visually captivating way to reach a broader audience and leave a memorable impression on potential customers. Businesses can effectively convey their brand message and offerings to target audiences across various online platforms by incorporating striking images, engaging videos, and interactive elements. Display advertising expands the reach and fosters meaningful connections with users, leading to increased brand awareness and improved engagement.

Leveraging display advertising as part of a comprehensive SEM strategy empowers businesses to stand out amidst competitors, drive higher website traffic, and achieve a higher return on investment. As businesses embrace the potential of display advertising, they unlock new avenues to connect with their audience, build brand authority, and achieve remarkable success in the ever-evolving landscape of Online Marketing.

FAQs:

What is display advertising in Marketing?

Display advertising in SEM refers to visual ads, such as images, videos, and interactive media, to promote products or services across various online platforms. These ads are displayed on websites, mobile apps, and social media platforms, targeting specific audiences based on their interests and demographics.

How does display advertising help in expanding the reach of businesses?

Display advertising expands reach by showcasing visually appealing ads to a wider audience. These eye-catching ads capture the attention of potential customers, even those who may not yet have searched for specific products or services. Display ads increase brand exposure and reach users interested in the offerings.

What are the benefits of using display advertising in Marketing campaigns?

Display advertising offers several benefits in marketing campaigns. It enhances brand visibility, increases website traffic, and fosters brand recall through engaging visuals. Display ads also offer precise targeting options, enabling businesses to reach the right audience at the right time, thereby improving conversions and ROI.

How can businesses optimise their display advertising for maximum impact?

Businesses should create visually appealing and relevant ads that resonate with their target audience. A/B testing different ad creatives, using compelling calls to action, and targeting the right audience segments are essential strategies. Regularly monitoring and analysing campaign performance helps refine and improve display advertising effectiveness.