Like all digital advertising, display marketing has developed significantly and there are now many different terms used to explain the process of building, bidding and buying display campaigns.
Although direct publisher buys do still occur when premium placements are required, Bridge Digital also provide a combination of the following approaches to increase targeting and in turn improve efficiency.
Ad Exchange
This is the term used for the marketplace for the buying and selling of ad inventory.
Ad Network
These aggregate leftover publisher inventory in to packages to be purchased through an Ad Exchange.
Ad Server
Sits outside of the purchase process and provides one central place for ad creative to be held and delivered across multiple publishers. This enables centralised reporting and an holistic overview of display performance.
Demand Side Platform
A DSP enables access to ad exchanges and enables us to provide a centralised campaign with unified campaign tracking and reporting.
An Ad Exchange holds an auction for each impression. A DSP enables real-time bidding; a bid request is sent to each DSP where the value of the impression is evaluated and a bid returned to the ad exchange where the ad of the winning bid is displayed. This process occurs in milliseconds.
Real-Time Bidding
This is the process of being able to complete bidding in real-time at an individual impression level. RTB provides efficient audience buying optimised to your objectives through the process of prospecting and retargeting.
Programmatic Buying
This is an extension of RTB. Some direct buying methodology is enabled, such as specific page buys, whist still allowing us to take advantage of individual impression buying.
Prospecting & Retargeting
Prospecting is the process of searching for potential customers. These customers are at the earlier stages of the purchase process: awareness and consideration. A DSP can use look alike models and 3rd Party Data to identify potential customers matching a similar online profile to your existing customers and increase the efficiency of our activity.
Retargeting is the process of advertising to potential customers that have shown some engagement with your brand e.g. left basket without purchasing. These customers are at the latter stages of the purchase process and tend to have a high-intent to purchase.
Data Management Platform
A DMP sits above all of these processes and compiles audience data with 1st, 2nd and 3rd Party data, making it actionable for cross channel marketing. This enables us to provide multi-channel delivery through display, search, mobile, social, video and your site.
How do I know if I need Display Advertising?
Developments in Display Advertising mean that it no longer requires a significant starting budget and advancements in attribution modelling have enabled us to see the important role Display plays within an integrated digital strategy. Here are some scenarios in which Display Advertising may be considered a beneficial marketing activity:
Growing your Business
Display Advertising builds scale and reach not possible through search marketing alone. Where Search marketing places your brand in front of a potential customer who has actively searched for a product or service you offer, display advertising creates an awareness of your brand leading a potential customer to consider their requirement of your product or service.
The exposure of your brand impacts other areas of your marketing and an increase in brand recall influences the sharing of brand content which can have a positive effect on your SEO performance. In turn exposure within both the PPC and SEO listings enhances a potential customer’s perception of your and they are not only more likely to click on your listing, but studies have shown they are more likely to purchase as well. It is these findings that highlight the requirement of integrated digital strategies.
Expanding to new territories
Current targeting capabilities of display advertising mean that prospecting in new territories no longer resembles finding a needle in a haystack. Bridge Digital is able to profile your existing customers and find like for like profiles of potential new customers regardless of their location.
“profile your existing customers and find like for like profiles of potential new customers regardless of their location…”
Introducing new products & services
There are a number of ways to effectively market new products and services through display marketing. The starting point is to make your existing customers aware of your new offering. This can be achieved through remarketing to those customers that have already engaged with your brand.
Traditional display media planning and buying also continues to be effective when buying premium placements to achieve high volume exposure for product and service launches.
Creating Brand Awareness
Increases of over 50% have been seen in the volume of trademark searches completed after exposure to display ads. In today’s competitive market you need to place your brand at the forefront of the customer’s mind.
The benefits of display advertising
As with PPC, display advertising provides marketing insights that should be integrated throughout your marketing. It benefits your business on a number of levels that include:
Impacts SEO Performance
Display advertising develops brand awareness leading to an increase in engagement with social activity and distributed content. This increase can have a positive impact on your SEO rankings and in turn the volume of natural traffic and conversions generated.
Creates Search Lift & Social Influence
The Display Advertising Impact: Search Lift and Social Influence study produced by Stanford University, found that consumers who saw a display ad performed 5% to 25% more campaign-relevant search queries than those who were not exposed to the ad.
Separately, a study performed by Yahoo! and ComScore revealed that when combined with Search, display advertising helped elevate conversions by 22%.
Drives Multi-Campaign Conversions
The same brand awareness mentioned previously results in a lift in brand searches, clickthrough rates, direct visits and on/offline purchasing.
We use our extensive analytical experience to apply attribution modelling to understand the true value of your display advertising.
Our Approach to Display Marketing
Display Advertising includes many acronyms – explained within ‘What is Display Marketing?’ – interconnecting to form Bridge Digital’s approach to display.
Our approach is performance led and focused on achieving objectives through the most cost effective strategy. Using advanced tracking capabilities and attribution modelling, we optimise display campaigns through the understanding of wider audiences and the true value of a campaign.
“Our approach is performance led and focused on achieving objectives through the most cost effective strategy…”
Programmatic Buying
In addition to traditional media planning and buying, we take a data driven, rules based approach to placing ads and messages through programmatic buying. We use our DMP to continually re-evaluate data on an ongoing basis, building customer profiles that become more accurate over time and allow us to execute highly targeted display advertising.
Real-Time Bidding
Our DMP and DSP work in conjunction to evaluate the value of an impression at a specific user level and a real time bid is returned to the Ad Exchange. This data led approach, matched with Bridge Digital’s in-house display marketing experts, makes display marketing an accessible and efficient form of digital advertising.
Prospecting & Retargeting
Bridge Digital maximise reach and return by driving awareness of your brand on sites known to be visited by your target audience. In conjunction, data is utilised to target and retarget audiences based on your existing customer profile.
The identifying of new audiences through demographic (1st party data), publisher (third party data), social and behavioural data, coupled together with additional forms of targeting such as contextual and geographic, enables us to customise our approach to finding new audiences at a low cost.
To ensure that the prospecting activity is highly efficient we will re-create high value profiles through look-a-like groups based on the 1st party data audiences that convert online. The budget is maximised by bidding within the ad exchanges based on our perceived value of the potential customer to ensure that less budget is being spent on lower ‘value’ segments.
First party data, customer profiling and RTB are utilised to implemented a cost effective retargeting strategy within which those visitors that have left your site without converting are retargeted to maximise budget and capture conversions cost-effectively.