How to boost the reach and relevance of display advertising
Ellie Edwards, MD of QUISMA, the European performance marketing agency, offers her top tips for boosting the reach and relevance of display advertising.
Advertisers certainly don’t have it all their own way. As the digital media landscape becomes ever more fragmented, it’s increasingly challenging to target specific customers and user groups; especially when it comes to reaching individuals with display advertising where multiple factors can determine a campaign’s success.
But developments in technology are helping advertisers to refine the accuracy of their communications and targeting; enabling them to get the right message to the right users at the right time.
Three approaches in particular are making online marketing campaigns more efficient and effective – ‘personalised retargeting’, ‘dynamic creative optimisation’ and ‘real-time bidding’.
Each approach is highly effective and has its merits when used on its own, but when all the three tools are combined intelligently, the effectiveness increases exponentially.
However, even with a high degree of automation, there are certain criteria which will ensure you achieve the best from your campaigns.
Make use of your database – a good database is the foundation of successful personalised retargeting. Being able to continuously optimise campaigns in real-time is a significant advantage of online advertising, so a robust database is a must. The more you know about a customer, the more precisely you can serve his or her specific interests
Campaign delivery is all about diversity – once you’ve recognised a customer’s cookie, you can accompany him or her along their online journey and serve them relevant advertising at the right moment in order to reawaken their interest in your product
‘Accompany’ your customers, don’t ‘stalk’ them – the success of user targeting also depends on how often you use the same ad creative to serve an individual. Optimised frequency capping ensures that each customer is served the right number of ads to elicit a positive response and does not feel like he is being stalked by a product or brand.
More advanced ad serving technology can identify what the optimal frequency is for each cookie rather than having to install a blanket approach across all customers
Get to grips with RTB – you can extend the reach of your campaign by using real-time bidding. Remember that sufficient reach is needed in order to find your ‘customers’ online and enable you to ‘retarget’ them efficiently
Dynamic creative optimisation can help you to ‘retarget’ more efficiently – by ensuring each ad is relevant to the individual based on what they viewed on the advertiser’s website meaning a near limitless number of ad variations can be generated. Two factors play an important role in this: namely the behaviour of the individual customer and the general behaviour of all customers.
Products determined to have the greatest relevance to the customer at that given moment and which generate the highest likelihood of a sale are displayed in the ad. Similarly the colours, placement of buttons and any other features of the ad can also be varied in real-time.
Only work with the best. Robust technology is required for the successful delivery of dynamically optimised retargeting campaigns. An ad server with retargeting functionality forms the basis for this.
At the same time, a special tool is used to generate the ad creative. Templates can be dynamically populated with product data from the advertiser’s product feed according to the individual customer.
This might sound simple, but the different solutions available on the market vary considerably – in their scope of service, but also in their performance. The most important distinguishing features are the control and optimisation algorithms which are crucial to the technology’s effectiveness.
To learn how personalised retargeting, dynamic, creative optimisation and real time buying can improve your online marketing, download our whitepaper.