'Net Features : display ads

Infolinks Battles Banner Blindness

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 15:36:00 GMT

If Display is Broken, Is Infolinks In3 the Creative Fix?

Many digital advertising gurus have been heralding the end of display for - geesh, I don't know - about as long as I've been on the 'Net (that would be pushing fifteen years by the way). In that time, I feel as though I've seen it all. But perhaps I haven't!

Infolinks, a digital advertising platform with a rather extensive history on the 'Net, has released a new suite of real-time, intent-based advertising products dubbed In3 (which stands for Infolinks, Intent and Intelligence). The set of ad units, according to Infolinks, appear in "unexpected but sensible spots on the page".

"Online display advertising is fundamentally broken," says Dave Zinman, InfoLinks new chief executive officer (and the former GM of Display at Yahoo!). "Site visitors rarely notice ads, there are too many and most are irrelevant. Engagement metrics are down. Banner blindness is killing the golden goose. This is the reason I've joined Infolinks. The In3 platform was developed expressly to deliver high-performing, creative solutions. In fact, Infolinks ads have been shown to deliver 30 times the engagement rate of standard IAB units."

30 times the engagement rate is quite the draw, but let's take a closer look at the formats to see if this is the hope we need or the hype we don't:

InFrame: Monetizes unused screen margins, framing site layouts with display banner ads. The In3 platform auto-detects when the browser window is wider than the website and inserts display ads that remain stationary as users scroll down the page.

InSearch: An overlay that appears when vistors arrive via a search engine. The unit features messaging relevant to the users query and dissappars after a few seconds, shrinking to a headline sized ad.

InTag: A tag cloud of keywords (more of a linear listing really) relevant to the content, which when clicked, pops up a window leading to advertising.

InText: In-line text advertising that has been the staple of Infolink product line for years.

Display Advertising Clicks

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Display advertising, once the dominion of big brand advertisers, has undergone quite the renaissance the past few years and has become accessible to a much larger professional audience of Web marketers thanks to new targeting and tracking technologies. Display is back in a big way, but does it work?

What has changed over the past few years is that display, which was once used primarily to drive brand awareness, now has the ability to generate click activity as well despite the general perception that those clicking on display ads were "hardly an attractive target segment for most advertisers" according to a 2008 Comscore study which proposed that most clicks were accidental in nature. But the times have changed.

A recent study by Criteo (PDF) however may just change the tune of those that have been hesitant to engage in display advertising. Criteo found that:

- users that click on display ads buy three times more frequently than non-clickers,
- Almost half of regular buyers click on Criteo ads alone
- 20 percent of browsers are responsible for 50% of clicks and sales
- the more browsers click, the more they buy

“It has always seemed strange that clickers should be so valuable in a search context, and yet irrelevant for banner advertising. It is therefore reassuring that this new research demonstrates that clickers are highly valuable in display advertising as well, at least for any advertiser looking ultimately to sell something,” said Pascal Gauthier, Chief Operating Officer at Criteo. “This huge study demonstrates that clickers buy much more than non-clickers, and that the more a user clicks, the more they buy.”

Display Ad Builder from Google the Salvation of Display

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 17:21:00 GMT

Google has announced several improvements to its Display Ad Builder, a service (launched in ’08) which enables advertisers to design display ads for free.

Improvements to the platform include:

Bulk copying and editing: Advertisers can now copy ads built with DAB (Display Ad Builder) across campaigns and make bulk edits (including ad names, destination and display URLs, and ad statuses.

Social and Expandable Templates: Perhaps the most innovative of the enhancements released, Google is now allows users of Display Ad Builder to build their brand and engage users with new social and expandable templates. Social templates include the latest tweets from a Twitter account in the creative. The expandable templates expand an advertisement when a user clicks to twice its width or height essentially claiming more of the page’s ad real estate.

Template Customization: If the two previous enhancements didn’t catch your attention, this one surely will. Google has given users of DAB the ability to customize the templates, moving text boxes and images where the advertiser wants within the template. Couple that with the ability to choose from a variety of fonts, sizes and backgrounds and you've got the making of a tool that made save the display advertising market.

New Report Has Rich Media Ads Gaining on Standard Formats

Linc Wonham — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Today comScore introduced a brand new analytics report that should prove extremely valuable for Web advertisers and publishers. Serving the optimal type of online ads is essential for marketers, and the Ad Metrix Creative Summary examines the latest advertising intelligence down to the last pixel.

The full May 2010 report is now available to subscribing clients via the comScore MyMetrix interface, but below are some of the highlights.

Display Ads by Format
•    JPEG display ads led the market with 42.4 percent of all impressions in the U.S.
•    Nearly 60 percent of the impressions were of the standard GIF (14.1%) / JPEG (42.4%) variety combined
•    Flash and rich media ads combined to represent 40.3 percent of all display ads viewed

Display Ads by Size
•    Leaderboard-style banner ads (728 x 90) were the most commonly viewed display ad type by size (23.1%)
•    Rectangles followed closely behind (22.7%), followed by non-standard units (22.1%)
•    Medium rectangles (300 x 250) were the most commonly used specific ad size (18.6%), followed by leaderboards (18.3%) and buttons (120 x 90) at 14.7 percent.

Among the more significant data is the high percentage of impressions attributed to Flash and other rich media technology including HTML5, and the fact that because of blockers in most browsers today, pop-up and pop-under ads accounted for less than 1 percent of the overall impressions.

Local, Geo-Targeted Ads on the Rise

Mike Phillips — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:37:00 GMT

According to digital media consulting firm BIA/Kelsey, geo-targeted ads will more than double in the coming years - from spending of $897 million in 2008 to more than $1.9 billion in 2013. According to the firm, geo-targeted ads currently represent about 10.2 percent of the market for display ad units, which will grow to 15 percent in 2013.

"Resellers like AT&T and the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium...are going to start to sell these geotargeted display products because the search CPCs are really high," said Matt Booth, SVP and program director at BIA/Kelsey. "If you're a reseller, you're buying a search click for $2 and you can get 1,000 impressions for 45 cents, the economics are in favor of shifting to this market."

Booth also says that small and mid-size businesses will be the ones taking advantage of geo-targeted ads, because these businesses tend to serve smaller, local markets. But there is certainly room for geo-targeting areas for any size company, brick-and-mortar or pure play online. Naturally, particular products will sell better in some regions than others. Of course, to take advantage of these opportunities you must look into your analytics.

We ask: Is your business involved in geo-targeted ads? If so, how has it impacted sales or brand awareness in those regions? Please comment below!

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EyeBlaster Report on Ad Size & Rich Media

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:42:00 GMT

Does size matter in online advertising? According to a study from digital ad solution provider Eyeblaster it doesn’t but creative execution and rich media certainly do.

While it’s bit of a self-serving study in that Eyeblaster is a rich media provider, it should reinforce that quality and not quantity (size) matters when it comes to display advertising.

Eyeblaster has confirmed that size has less of an impact in rich media display ads than that of standard banners, and points to video, ad formats, flash features and expansion as key elements in driving performance. The study suggests that for rich media, half banners (234x60) are indeed the top performing rich media ad formats, followed by rectangle ad formats (180x150).

The company did provide some rather practical guidance on increasing performance and consumer engagement:

1.   Re-evaluate the role of technology and consider aligning creative with appropriate metrics in the beginning stages of planning a campaign.
2.   Use adaptive media to optimize, make creative changes creative of the fly and keep content fresh by swapping out video, sound, text, images, etc.
3.   For greatest impact, take into account placement on page, creative features, metrics and ad format over size.

"Eyeblaster data suggests that physical size of a banner has less to do with performance than creative execution and rich media," said Gal Trifon, CEO and co-founder at Eyeblaster. "This corroborates other published studies that reveal that bigger banners do not equate to better engagement."

Stay up to date on the latest Internet trends:
Request a professional subscription to Website Magazine,
the most popular print publication on Web success.

Yahoo Launches Display Ad Marketplace

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:14:00 GMT

Display advertising, once the darling of Internet marketing, fell out of favor as the rise of PPC (pay-per-click) advertising began.

That may soon change as Yahoo! today launched Yahoo! My Display Ads, a self-serve display ad marketplace for ads on Yahoo and its partner sites. The service is powered by AdReady, a service profiled in Website Magazine's June issue on e-commerce.

The merits of display advertising are many. Perhaps the most important reason to consider display ads however is that the reach users at a totally different point in the sales cycle than search does (which usually occurs at the beginning of the purchase process). According to the Yahoo! blog post on the announcement, "Getting in front of someone with display ads when they’re in an open mindset can influence whether people search for you or not when they are ready to buy."

According to a 2008 Specific Media study, people who saw a display ad for a product were 155 percent more likely to search for that product than those who didn’t. Much like Google, Yahoo! is clearly looking to ramp up the more lucrative display ads, convert some of its search ad business to the more lucrative display ads. Yahoo! has offered display ads across its network since its inception, but the ability to create ads from templates should make it easier for smaller businesses to get into the display ad market.

Advertisers can upload their existing ads or build their own from more than 700 templates. And, unlike traditional display, you can get started with as little as $30 a day and choose either CPM-based (cost-per-thousand impressions) or CPC-based (cost-per-click) pricing. Ads can be targeted by geography, channel or audience demographics.

"This new solution provides an affordable and accessible option for businesses to run brand and performance campaigns that reach the local audiences that matter to them most," Joanne Bradford, senior VP of North America revenue and market development at Yahoo, said in a statement.

“AdReady’s partnership with Yahoo! will provide advertisers with direct access to high value advertising inventory from the largest provider of display advertising in the world,” said Aaron Finn, President and CEO, AdReady. “With Yahoo! My Display Ads, we hope to make display as easy, effective and accessible as search.”

As a brief aside, Google has had a Display Ad builder for quite some time (using its own technology). Display Ad Builder is similar in functionality but not nearly as robust (plus, it only works with Google Adwords). Unique about AdReady by the way is that display advertisers (at least in the regular solution) can advertise directly on multiple platforms, including Google and its partner sites, not just Right Media and Yahoo! sites.

Display Ad & SEM Study from iProspect

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:40:00 GMT

Despite considerable speculation about the relationship between search engine marketing and online display advertising, findings from a new study from iProspect indicate that the two channels have a closer relationship than many marketers may have thought.

iProspect's Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Integration Study shows that Internet users initially respond to the medium as follows: 31% respond by directly clicking on an ad; 27% respond by searching for the product, brand, or company by launching a search on a search engine; 21% respond by typing the company Web address into their browser and directly navigating to the website; and 9% respond by investigating the product, brand, or company through social media venues. Overall, 52% of Internet users actively respond to online display advertising.

But beyond Internet users' initial response to online display advertising, the study also reveals some interesting findings when the latency element is taken into consideration. When asked how they eventually respond, nearly half of Internet users (49%) who respond to online display ads (52%) launch a search on a search engine for the company, product, or brand that was the focus of the ad to which they were exposed. This figure is comprised of those who eventually perform a search and visit the website from the search results (38%), those who do the same but actually purchase the product (14%), and those who perform a search but do not click on any of the results (11%).

Other key findings from the study include:

One third of Internet users (33%) who respond to online display advertising eventually purchase from a company/offering with which they are familiar - more than twice the number who eventually purchase after learning of an offering/company for the first time from online display advertising (14%).
Nearly four in ten Internet users (38%) who respond to online display advertising learn about a brand for the first time as a result of their exposure to this type of ad.
9% of Internet users who respond to online display advertising initially respond by investigating the product, brand, or company through social media venues or message boards.

"At the end of the day, the findings from this study closely tie search and online display advertising together," said Robert Murray, CEO, iProspect. "Overall, they tell a story of improved efficacy, which is a message that marketers should find particularly compelling during these trying economic times when they are being asked to do more with less."

"Clearly, this finding underscores the close relationship between search and online display advertising," said Misty Locke, President, Range Online Media, and Chief Strategy Officer, iProspect. "First, it speaks to the power of display to drive search, and it demonstrates search's ability to boost the effectiveness of display. However, it also quantifies the risk associated with not supporting the display channel with search engine marketing. Obviously, marketers who fail to do so will be missing out on a considerable portion of potential website visitors, and as the stats show, customers. The findings also speak to the need for marketers to implement attribution modeling that is created with their needs in mind. This is key to understanding not only the impact of search and display on conversions, but also the impact of all of their online tactics."

Yahoo Includes Images and Video in Ads

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 15:09:00 GMT

The New York Times is reporting that Yahoo plans to introduce video and images into paid search ads. Couple that with Comscore indicating that Yahoo! increased its search share while Google slid (albeit slightly), and you may want to start taking Yahoo! seriously once more.

With a real push toward Universal Search on SERPs over the past few years, paid advertising never really caught up and was typically restricted to only text and links. The new Rich Ads in Search offering, which should be announced later today, gives traditional search ads a way to distinguish themselves and ideally improve the click-through rate of ads. It sounds good for advertisers and Yahoo!, which for many years has focused on and specialized in display banner advertisements. The word on the street is that advertisers were experiencing a 25 percent increase in click-through rates, but as with anything, that percentage increase will be dependent on the actual advertiser.

From the New York Times article, “It moves the advertising experience from just the blue links, to a more engaging experience for advertisers,” said Tim Mayer, vice president for search monetization and distribution at Yahoo!. Early reports (remember, this has not been publicly announced yet) indicate that there will be a monthly charge for the service and that it will be initially limited to larger, more notable brands such as SoBe, Pepsi and Pedigree. If Yahoo! really wants to make a play for some of Google's paid search market share, they would extend the program to more advertisers. Based on Yahoo!'s past actions, that's not something you should assume.

You can search for Pepsi, Pedigree or SoBe to see the rich search ads in action.

Here are a few images to give you an idea: