The Benefits Of Using Display Advertising

Display advertising is often sneered at by those who own or work for small businesses or by companies that haven’t fully embraced digital marketing yet. However, there are huge benefits to using display advertising and the costs that are attributed to it aren’t anywhere near as scary as you might think. Moreover, you can obtain a fantastic return on investment that can be measured in more ways than just revenue.

When we talk about display advertising the definition can sometimes be quite broad as to what it covers. To make clear what we’re going to be talking about, we’re only looking at still images, animated images and videos that are hosted either individually or through publishing networks, i.e. traditional banner adverts. Social media adverts, YouTube Adverts and Google Shopping Adverts ARE NOT included in this definition.

The obvious benefit to start with is increased revenues. There’s a myth that goes around that no one clicks on banner ads or that the click through rate is as low as 0.006%. It’s simply not true. If you take out the spammy adverts or adverts delivered on spammy sites or illegal streaming sites you see that the click through rate can be as high as 0.33% – the average is about 0.1% to 0.15%. This still isn’t a massive CTR when compared to other advertising methods such as SEO, PPC and paid social adverts. However, you must consider the big audience who see these ads which turn into just as many people coming through this channel. The conversion rate of display advertising is between 0.5% – 3% for a good campaign and whilst this is lower than SEO, it is somewhat similar to PPC and paid social adverts.

What a lot of traditional marketers forget is the value of people seeing your advert and whether it later translates to someone coming to your site at a later stage, as there isn’t any trackable metric. However, any Display Advertising Manager will know that with properly set up attribution modelling in Google Analytics you can track whether someone saw your advert and then later used another digital marketing channel to get to your website. This translates into taking part of the value of any conversion that happened through another channel. In addition, this helps you increase the revenue attributed to display advertising and shows the true ROI. When we combine attribution modelling into the mix, display advertising suddenly becomes a very valuable asset with a very good ROI.

In effect, display advertising has a very poor ROI when you just look at it from a direct CTR and conversion rate perspective. However, you should think of it as a touch point that places your brand in someone’s mind and will encourage them to convert. Think of it like a TV advert or billboard on the side of a road. You don’t go and buy the product through the TV or through the billboard but, later on, you may buy the product in a shop after having processed the advert’s information and built the need to acquire it. The beauty of display advertising is that, unlike a billboard, we can track when that person saw it, how many times they saw it and what channel they used to convert after they had seen the advert.

Moving away from revenue, the other benefit is a raised brand awareness. If you want to position your product or service in front of your audience then display advertising is one of the best ways to do it. You get to use a visual method of doing so online that isn’t as easy to achieve through other digital marketing channels. It’s about creating touchpoints, much like you would with a newspaper, TV, leaflet or magazine advert. This raises the brand’s profile, be it a brand or a service. Once the brand’s profile has been raised, the brand will remain in the minds of the audience. This will also generate chatter and get those who have seen the advert will promote it organically to new audiences who may not have seen the advert before.

With all of this in mind regarding revenue, lead generation and brand awareness you can see the varied benefits that display advertising provides. What is also obvious is that display advertising provides an attractive ROI when the correct modelling is applied to show the true impact the advertising has on a user’s path to purchase.

If you’re interested in hearing more about display advertising or think it would be a useful advertising tool for your company, please get in touch. We provide a full display advertising design and strategy, whether you are using us as your display advertising agency or you have an in-house team using a publishing network themselves who need some help with the creative side of things.

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