'Net Features : display advertising

Click-to-Call from Mobile Display

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 15 May 2013 19:30:00 GMT

Performance marketing network Tradedoubler has partnered with mobile ad placement company Freespee and will use its technology platform and API to offer clickable phone numbers and analytics to its desktop and mobile display advertisers.

"For services with local offices, like insurance, education, finance, health, beauty, travel, telecom and other utilities, 70 percent of consumers want to talk to someone before opening their wallets," said Carl Holmquist, Freespee founder and CEO. "Especially when advertising on mobile phones, a call is the natural next step after seeing the ad -- and we make that call just one click away and totally trackable for conversion optimisation."

The rise in consumers mobile activity is obviously making click-to-call technology an important if not mandatory element in the digital advertising mix. Those networks and agencies that realize the immediacy benefit of the technology for users are signing on (as evidenced here by the TradeDoubler/Freespee partnership).

Google reports that mobile users are 6 percent to 8 percent more likely to click on ads that contain a phone number. And, even when mobile users click through to a mobile landing page instead of the phone number, Google's research found that 52 percent of those people go on to call the advertiser.

"The beauty of Freespee is we don't have to reinvent the wheel -- we can add clickable, trackable phone numbers to our desktop and mobile ad formats with just a couple of lines of code," said Rob Wilson, CEO of Tradedoubler, whose network includes 140,000 website publishers and 2,000 advertisers. "For a large segment of our advertisers this is incredibly valuable because these ads on average convert six times better than a traditional online or mobile display ad."

Hey, Where’s My Display Ad?

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Display advertising has seen a resurgence over the past few years thanks to much improved targeting and testing technologies, but some very significant problems remain.

A new report out from Comscore indicates that 3 out of 10 display ads were never rendered "in-view" in 2012. Despite delivering upwards of six trillion impressions, if users can't see the ad they are certainly unlikely to ever click (or take any action).

For advertisers the lack of "viewable" impressions results in significant waste, weaker campaign performance and poor-performing inventory overall that imbalances the supply-and-demand equation and depresses CPMs. Through the continued adoption of a viewable impressions standard however, the market will likely move toward a model that better aligns monetization with the value created by the inventory according to Comscore.

“2013 is poised to be digital’s most exciting year yet as the growing ubiquity of digital platforms presents marketers with nearly endless opportunities to connect and engage with consumers,” said Linda Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of Global Product Development. “It’s clear that the dynamics of the marketplace have fundamentally evolved through the adoption of smartphones and tablets and the increasingly ‘digital’ nature of all media. Navigating this changing landscape requires a holistic understanding of the key trends, underlying drivers and new opportunities that the digital ecosystem will bring in the year ahead.”

Comscore provided several insights in its 2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report, including details on social media market share, Google and Bing search market share, online video, and ecommerce.

Track Competitors on Google Display Network

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:17:00 GMT

Would you like to know where your competitors are running their display ads, who they are buying that inventory from and exactly what ads are in rotation currently? Well, you can - and you’ve been able to for quite some time. As of this week though it’s become less expensive and for those with a limited market research budget, that should come as welcome news.

Competitive intelligence service WhatRunsWhere this week released Ad Vantage, a stand-alone service for tracking display ads running exclusively on the Google Display Network. While Facebook remains in some respect the king of display, Google is expected to pass them as early as this year. Why is that important? A scaled down version of the WhatRunsWhere service can still prove to be incredibly useful.

“Many of our smaller customers place ads only on the Google Display Network, so they didn’t need the more robust capabilities of the complete WhatRunsWhere solution, which includes competitive intelligence of banner and text ad campaigns across the entire web and mobile universe,” said Mike Cojanu, chief executive officer of WhatRunsWhere. According to Cojanu, Ad Vantage was developed “to zero in on their (small advertisers) needs while reducing their costs.”

WhatRunsWhere’s more robust offering provides insights on over 40 networks, but this version (which focuses exclusively on the Google Display Network) will definitely be appealing to many – particularly if you’re on a limited market research budget or just want to get a general idea of what your competitors are up to in terms of their display efforts. The Ad Vantage service is currently offered at a price of $20/mo or $200 annually.

Dynamic Display Ads and the Future of Performance Marketing

Michael Garrity — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 22:30:00 GMT

Engaging visitors has always been the primary goal of both publishers and advertisers in the affiliate marketing industry, but for most of the existence of the Internet, their collective ability to interact with consumers has been limited, to say the least.

But the times they are a-changin’. These days, there are companies making impressive strides in the development of new technologies that can increase the value of display ads by making them more alluring to the average Web user. One such company is mediaFORGE, the dynamic display media organization that was recently acquired by Rakuten LinkShare.

The deal adds to LinkShare’s arsenal of affiliate marketing services and solutions, as well as its search marketing and lead generation tools, to help online retailers drive multi-channel, integrated marketing campaigns using the mediaFORGE Consumer Engagement display platform. This platform gives online advertisers the opportunity to prospect, retarget, nurture and engage customers for higher conversions.

According to mediaFORGE CEO Tony Zito, the platform provides “real visibility for how banner and display ads work with other performance channels.”

mediaFORGE’s ad platform features dynamic, engaging and uniquely relevant content meant to entice consumers to interact with the display, which not only increases user interest in an ad, but also provides additional engagement metrics (outside of just views or clicks) that can be used to better understand the actual value of each advertisement thanks to a built-in rich analytics platform that measures how consumers interact with the content inside the ad, providing a clear picture of how the ad influences users.

Incorporating this technology into its existing marketing services made perfect sense to LinkShare. The company didn’t just want any old display solution and felt that mediaFORGE presented a platform that had a unique value to its clients, making it a great fit for the performance marketing channel. In the future, LinkShare would like to continue to build mediaFORGE technology further into its network to work with advertisers and publishers to identify “multi-channel synergies and technical integration opportunities” with dynamic online advertising.

In acquiring mediaFORGE, LinkShare is accelerating the company’s expansion and reach throughout the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Japan.

Self-service Retargeting Platform from Bizo

Linc Wonham — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Because generating enough leads is perhaps the biggest challenge facing today’s online marketers, audience marketing solutions provider Bizo has a new offering that taps the power of display ad retargeting beginning at $5 per day.

Bizo Retargeting is a self-service platform designed to help companies convert more leads by targeting display ads to those people who have visited their websites without converting. Because these prospects have already expressed an interest in the marketer’s products or services, retargeting is typically one of the highest-performing display ad tactics.

By helping brands stay top of mind wherever prospects travel online, retargeting can also lift the conversion rates of other marketing programs such as email, search ads or social media.

Bizo Retargeting also includes website audience reporting and analytics, which gives marketers visibility into the business demographic make-up of their website audiences (e.g. company size, industry, job function and seniority), and a clear understanding of which audiences are converting. Armed with these insights, marketers can get a handle on whether their programs are driving the right audiences to their websites so they can optimize their program mix to set up even more impactful retargeting campaigns.

“Retargeting is a core nurturing strategy we employ in just about every display campaign we run for the more than 500 brands that we support,” says Chris Mann, Bizo’s VP of product management. “With our self-service solution, we’ve packaged up one of the highest-performing display ad tactics, business audience analytics and Bizo’s premium inventory, and made this accessible to organizations of any size on a performance basis.”

For the last two months, Bizo customers including Upsellit and Field ID have been participating in a private Beta of the new product.

“Based on the results we’re seeing, our retargeting campaigns are really serving as the ‘closer’ to all those leads that don’t convert on our website the first time around,” says Bryan Gudmundson, creative and marketing director for Upsellit. “Since we hadn’t had much experience with display advertising, Bizo’s Retargeting solution is helping us to kick-start display in our mix in a way that’s already having an impact.”

More information about Bizo Retargeting is available here.

AdWords Refines Display Ad System

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:30:00 GMT

AdWords advertisers running display campaigns have been using a system that was designed for search-based advertising, and doing so for many years. It's worked well but according to an announcement made today, Google is preparing advertisers for the fairy tale-like future that is display, rolling out some big changes that aim to simplify the increasingly important process of buying and running display ads.

For starters, Google will be rolling out an entirely new interface for display ads. Google built the interface for the exclusive purpose of running display campaigns. Through the system's interface, advertisers will be able to bid, target and optimize their display campaigns from a single location.

Perhaps most noteworthy are the improvements Google has made to its contextual engine -- which matches ads to pages based on keywords. AdWords advertisers will soon have the ability to combine the "reach of display with the precision of search", according to Google. Translated from Google-speak, that means advertisers can optimize performance of contextual campaigns down to the individual keyword level.

Google provides a good example below:

"Let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a travel agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency, you might realize that the keyword 'Turks and Caicos vacations' is four times more profitable than the keyword 'caribbean vacations'. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high-performing keywords, and be more conservative on 'caribbean vacations'."

Providing a dedicated tab and improving the ad refinement capabilities are just two of the enhancements coming soon. Google has also introduced a way to help advertisers visualize the reach of campaigns and see how "reach" is impacted by "combining multiple targeting types, such as keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing."

MediaMind: The Sidekick Banner Format Performs Best

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 04:00:00 GMT

Digital advertising solution provider MediaMind has released a new study that examines the best performing display formats.

MediaMind analyzed the Dwell Rate and Average Dwell Duration of over 300,000 creatives. The dwell rate is the percentage of users exposed to a given piece of rich-media content or advertising who interact with that content moving their cursor over it – but not clicking on it.

The dwell duration, therefore, would be how long (in seconds, for example) the user dwelled over the ad. Dwell as a metric is linked to higher brand effectiveness, and some argue that it is a more relevant indicator of an ad’s impact than a click count alone.

The top five performing ad formats according to Media Mind are the Sidekick, the Pushdown, the Homepage Takeover, Messenger Ads and the Video Extender. According to the MediaMind research, the Sidekick format delivered a 60-percent higher Dwell Rate than a Polite Banner, and that users are 164 percent more likely to engage with a Pushdown banner.

“As users shift from more traditional media to online advertising, advertisers must recognize that the ad format is an essential part of the creative,” says Gal Trifon, general manager of MediaMind and chief digital officer of parent company DG. “From the tiny Messenger Ad to the Homepage Takeover, the right ad format can really make a difference for a brand.”

+1 Button Moves to Ads

Michael Garrity — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

We're going to be hearing a lot about social networks in the coming days with Google+ finally opening up to the public and Facebook making several big changes, and this post is no exception.

Coinciding with the public opening of Google+ is a new feature on all display ads that will be served through the Google Display Network, which currently holds about 15 percent of the online ad network marketing share. Starting in early October, all of these advertisements will come with a +1 button attached to them, allowing users to recommend the ads to their friends on Google+. Google has already been using this button so that Plussers can recommend content, search results and websites.

Google will start taking these recommendations into account when they are serving ads, so if a user takes the time to endorse a particular advertisement, that ad will have a much better chance of showing up on Web pages (served by the Google Display Network) that their friends visit, as well.

According to Google, "The Google Display Network gives ads that have been recommended an extra boost by including them in the auction for any page a friend visits."

All in all, this should be very useful for advertisers, as users are probably going to be less likely to ignore ads that have been recommended by their friends, which puts more of an actual social spin on the social media side of advertising.

This is all part of an attempt by Google to "extend the +1 buttons as broadly as possible," which is something that only Google can really do, since no other advertising networks have any kind of social networking outlet near what Google has accomplished with Google+. There is even talk that they are looking to make the button available to ads outside of the Google Display Network.

Of course, it's beneficial for Google, too, as it can now collect data about the effectiveness of these ads, even if it doesn't get money from the advertisers. Eventually, this will probably lead to improved relevance and clickthrough rates for the ads that are sold.

Saving Display: Ads Get Social at SiteScout

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:15:00 GMT

Banner ads never did receive much in the way of click-throughs and as such advertisers (and the publishers that support them) are on the look out for anything that might reverse the long and tedious slide of display into obscurity.

Advertising technology (media buying) company SiteScout is on the scene today, releasing a rather unique system to create dynamic display ads that are integrated with social media widgets out of the box. SiteScout’s AdBuilder aim to increase engagement, add “social proof” (social validation) to a campaign and leverage the inherent viral nature of social networks.

"We are extremely excited to be offering this new tool to our advertisers." says Paul Mokbel, SiteScout CEO, "We think that both brands and direct response marketers will get tremendous value from this new breed of ad."

SiteScout’s AdBuilder tool is available exclusively on its RTB (real-time bidding) platform.

Facebook's Latest Conquest is Quite a Display

Linc Wonham — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:30:00 GMT

Yahoo, of course, is used to this kind of thing by now. For Google, it’s simply time to reload and fight harder.

Facebook is now projected to pass both companies in 2011 U.S. online display advertising revenues with an estimated $2.19 billion. Previous leader Yahoo is forecast to bring in $1.62 billion, followed by Google.

Which of the two is feeling more threatened by the news is a matter of debate, as display has been Yahoo’s bread and butter while it continues an attempted reorganization. Display has been a relatively recent priority for longtime search giant Google, but the projected $1.15 billion earnings in 2011 represent a 10-percent decline from earlier estimates.

Plus, the Facebook Surpasses Google thing is getting really old over at the Googleplex.

Because online display advertising is growing faster than search, Google has made significant moves there to help secure its position of overall Web dominance – a title that Facebook has made no bones about wanting to claim as its own. Yahoo, meanwhile, appears headed in the opposite direction, but if the estimates are correct it will lose its hold on display.

Then there is AOL, another once-dominant force that recently made its mark on the display industry with the successful introduction of much larger ad units under the name Project Devil.

Google has increased its display portfolio by offering numerous new options through YouTube and recently purchased ad startup Admeld for $390 million. Neither of the three companies now looking up at Facebook are averse to big-ticket purchases such as that one, but Google has the most cash on hand and is the most likely to start one of its prolific buying sprees if it thinks it will help.

Perhaps most frightening about Facebook for any company trying to compete in display revenues is that the social network’s advertising platform is just beginning to hit its stride. More than 20 third-party companies such as Blinq, Kenshoo and Adparlor sell Facebook advertising to agencies and Web marketers, and with nearly 700 million users the appeal for big brands is clear.

Relative Clickthrough Rate & Impression Share (GDN)

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:22:00 GMT

Google has been investing heavily over the past year in targeting, optimization and measurement, and advertisers are first in line to benefit with two recently released enhancements to the Google display network.

Relative CTR: While clickthrough rate (CTR) indicates how often users click on ads it can't tell you how ads perform compared to other ads on the same page - enter "relative CTR" which shows advertisers how ads perform relative to those ads being displayed on the same places on the Google Display network. For example, if your display ads have a CTR of 0.04%, while other ads in the same places on the GDN have a CTR of 0.02%, your Relative CTR is (0.04)/(0.02) = 2x. Relative CTR will be a solid indicator to advertisers they they are outperforming or underperforming other advertisers and that display ads are resonating.

Impression Share: Google also released the Impression Share (IS) feature which represents the percentage of times that ads were shown out of the total available impressions on the Google Display network. For example, advertisers may notice they are losing 25% of impression share due to budget restrictions and must increase this campaign’s daily budget to get more impressions. Or that they are losing 35% of impression share due to Ad Rank and may need to raise bids or improve creatives.

Two other notable features were released for the GDN this week including the Unseen Impression Filter which ensures that advertisers are not charge for impressions that have a low probability of viewing, and the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool (CADT) which indicates why ads aren't showing.

Top Source of Traffic & Conversion

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:25:00 GMT

: Email Dominates in Traffic & Conversion :

SeeWhy studied a sampling of 60,000 ecommerce transactions in February 2011 and found that not only is it the primary driver of traffic for Internet retailers, but does pretty well as a driver of conversions too.

Online marketers in all verticals go around and around as to the best source of converting traffic. While the SeeWhy study applies only to merchants (and furthermore only to those user sessions where an item was added into a shopping cart), it does clearly show how important email marketing is to the revenues of merchants - despite its often maligned reputation.

Email was responsible for 56.8 percent of traffic arriving at the shopping cart and 67 percent of the conversions. Compare that to the next largest segment in direct traffic (type-in, bookmark) which accounted for 17.9 percent of traffic and 23.68 percent of the conversions. Search marketing, referrals (presumably affiliates), social media, and display advertising rounded out the list and were collectively responsible for approximately 25% of the traffic and less than ten percent of the conversions. Not a good sign, particuarly with the influx in social media investment.

So Website Magazine reader, which source of your traffic has the best conversion rate? Share with others by commenting below.

Facebook Delivers One-third of U.S. Display Ad Impressions

Linc Wonham — Wed, 04 May 2011 21:00:00 GMT

Facebook led all online publishers in the first quarter of 2011 with 346 billion display ad impressions, representing 31.2 percent market share, according to the comScore data released Wednesday.

Facebook’s market share has increased 15 percentage points from 16.2 percent in Q1 2010. Yahoo! Sites ranked second during the most recent quarter with 112 billion impressions (10.1 percent), followed by Microsoft Sites with 54 billion impressions (4.8 percent) and AOL with 33 billion impressions (3.0 percent).

Overall, nearly 1.11 trillion display ads were delivered to U.S. Internet users during the quarter.

AT&T ranked as the top online display advertiser in the first quarter with 19.5 billion impressions, accounting for 1.8 percent of display ads. Experian Interactive ranked second with 16.6 billion impressions (1.5 percent), followed by Scottrade, which ranked third with 11.2 billion (1.0 percent) and Intuit with 11 billion (1.0 percent).

Groupon entered the top 10 display advertisers at No. 7 with 7.7 billion impressions (0.7 percent).

Topic Targeting in Google Display Network

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 19:04:00 GMT

Google announced that advertisers engaged in keyword-based contextual targeting on the its Display Network will now also be able to do so in a new way - selecting from over 1,750 topics and sub-topics.

Using keywords for contextual targeting has allowed advertisers to focus on a very specific set of pages including those terms in the display network Using topic-based contextual targeting however will be quite a departure.

Google will analyze all of the terms on a page to determine the topic - a pretty significant shift for those involved with contextual targeting through Adwords and publishers profiting from the ability via Adsense.

As with other targeting options on the Google Display Network, contextual targeting by topic supports all ad formats, such as text, display, video, and rich media, as well as all the available bidding options, such as cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand-impression (CPM), and cost-per-acquisition (CPA).

All in all, expect more advertisers to start exploring the opportunities in the Google Display network as its has quickly, thanks to topic targeting, become more accessible and “friendly” to those that may shy away from the complexities of keyword-based targeting.

Facebook is UK's Biggest Display Ad Market

Mike Phillips — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 00:30:00 GMT

ComScore released an overview of the UK online display advertising market for Q3 2010, which not only showed strong gains for the medium as a whole but also lists Facebook as the UK's single largest display ad publisher on the Web. Facebook accounted for 68 billion display ad impression (does not include video ads or house ads), for a 31 percent market share. A distant second was Microsoft Sites (14 billion), followed by eBay (8.8 billion) and Google Sites (8.2 billion). This not only points out how large the Facebook audience is, but also the pervasiveness of advertising on the world's largest social network. And in the face of advertising, users have not abandoned the site on grounds of "intrusion." That's good news for advertisers.

Also according to the comScore findings, the display market overall enjoyed a 34 precent increase in ad impressions over Q3 2009, reaching more than 221 billion display ads. Display advertising is clearly on the rise once again.