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AdLinks: Top Articles on Display Advertising
It’s been an exciting month here at AdReady as we kick off 2012. There was no warm up period or slow start to the exciting articles coming out about display advertising and predictions for what’s to happen in this new year. Here are some of our top links we’ve come across over the past month:
- Three Predictions for Display Advertising in 2012 from Top CEOs in the Ad Space
- In preparation for the Superbowl, we looked at 12 Ads That Changed Super Bowl Marketing
- Google announces “Search + Your World.” This could greatly influence Google+ posts in your search results and impact SEO.
- Big Data is a popular buzz word. Learn why it’s not about how much data you have, but what you do with it.
- We are entering a New Era in Display Advertising. Here are five reasons why search marketers should care.
- Facebook announced they are rolling out display ads to your news feed.
- Want to get started on a retargeting campaign? These five great tips will help improve your conversion rates.
- Display Advertising 2.0 comprises a number of advancements to the industry. Learn what these are.
- Google is poised to surpass Yahoo in display advertising. And Facebook just overtook Yahoo as well.
- AdReady and Buuteeq partner on online ad service for hotels
- Online Ad Spending to Surpass Print for First Time in 2012
- SOPA bill is removed after much deliberation and public uproar.
- AdReady drives new innovation through the Power of Two: Integrating Social Advertising with Display Platforms
- Love infographics as much as we do? This one highlights How Display Works in the Marketing Mix
- Facebook now takes a 28% share of US display ads
Hope you enjoyed this month’s AdLinks. Have a great week!
The Power of Two: AdReady Drives Social and Display Innovation
– blog post by AdReady’s Senior Account Manager, Kingway Yeh
They say there are only two things in life that are inevitable: death and taxes.
With the explosion of social media in recent years and specifically, continued membership growth on Facebook, it can be argued that an advertising agency will inevitably encounter client questions on Facebook advertising and how to effectively run an ad on Facebook. As more and more people spend their time online and on Facebook, it becomes imperative for agencies to be able to effectively manage not only online advertising for a client, but their Facebook advertising as well. This is where AdReady’s initiative to drive Social and Display innovation step in.
Beta testing of AdReady’s Facebook Marketing API integration will begin shortly, and it brings the exciting capability of simplified Facebook campaign creation and bulk Facebook ad management. In addition to the various integrated media sources within the AdReady platform, this implementation will bring an expanded capability to manage, track and report on Facebook campaigns and Facebook Connections. No longer will you need to manage online display campaigns in one interface, then jump into Facebook’s interface to manage an isolated set of campaigns. With AdReady, you will have access to a consolidated campaign management tool and reporting interface. Keep track of the typical branding and marketing metrics while also seeing the number of Likes driven by your Facebook efforts. Get access to actionable reports that allow continuous optimization efforts based on Facebook data and so much more.
Drive client ROI by consolidating your Social and Display campaign management efforts. Contact Us today for details.
My Data is Bigger than Yours
–written by Matt Carr, SVP of AdReady’s Product and Business Development
It’s not how much you have, it’s what you do with it
By now, we’ve probably all finished reading a variety of ‘2012 Predictions’ for online advertising. You may noticed that a lot of predictions looked vaguely familiar to predictions in the past. Some came true, some flopped, but one trend that is definitely here to stay is the importance of ‘Big Data.’
Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to CNN is talking about the roles of big data and how future jobs and companies will be shaped by it.
Now, how is any of this relevant to those of us working with smaller advertising budgets? I’d say it is pretty darn relevant.
Key is: big boatloads of data is not enough. Smaller advertisers need an approach that fits the unique needs of smaller advertising budgets. If you spend a few thousand dollars a month on display advertising, I’m sure it’s hard to get your calls answered from many of those ‘big data’ advertising companies.
And this is even more exacerbated if you are trying to run campaigns on large networks and exchanges – where the economics of buying large-scale, price-competitive media is very appealing. If you don’t have a solid strategy and a way to bid smartly, you can end up in a tough position.
Here at AdReady, we’re taking ‘big data’ and making it work well for advertisers with smaller budgets. In addition to doing all the basics around ensuring we are getting access to all the sources of data that work, we are building and tuning our recommendations and optimizations to help smaller budgets succeed.
That includes things like:
- So that you don’t have to figure out your bids, budget allocations and targeting, we’re taking the guesswork out of optimization
- Augmenting smaller campaigns to make them act bigger, benefiting from learnings of other historical AdReady campaigns to make you perform better immediately
- So you can make your media work for you out of the gate, we’re eliminating long test periods
One thing you can check out is a recent presentation that we did in comparing online advertising to the principles from Moneyball – the recent movie and best-selling book. Check it out! I think there are some interesting parallels and it speaks to the value of small budgets taking a different approach than large budgets. Think Oakland A’s vs. New York Yankees!
Moneyball: Driving Home Runs with Display Advertising
If you missed Olly Downs presentation last week on display advertising, here are the slides from his webinar. We are currently working on getting audio to accompany this presentation, but we wanted to make sure you had access to his slides as soon as possible.
Moneyball: Driving Home Runs with Display Advertising
View more presentations from AdReady .
Creative solutions to make your small budget work
–blog post by AdReady’s Account Manager, Meghan Taylor
One hurdle to display advertising is that many advertisers may be apprehensive due to the potential time commitment and budget that is associated with launching display campaigns.
The prospect of launching a display campaign can seem daunting, as there are many factors to consider.
- How should you target your campaigns?
- How will you measure success?
- How many ads should you run? More importantly, how will you allocate valuable time and resources to design several banner ads, each with multiple ad sizes?
AdReady’s display advertising solutions make display advertising much less intimidating, especially when it comes to designing, launching, and iterating upon your display ads. Through AdReady’s creative tool, you can design an ad, complete with your own images, logo, and text, in a matter of minutes.
Once you launch your display campaign, it is imperative that you monitor your creative performance. If your ads are not performing well, you will want to test new ad concepts.
If one ad stands out, you will want to iterate on your ad to test new versions. With AdReady’s creative solutions, creating new ads and iterating upon current ads can be done in a matter of minutes, and at no extra cost to you.
The success of your display ad campaigns hinges on creative testing. Rather than blindly designing ads, why not let AdReady’s proven display ad solutions help?
Driving Home Runs With Display Advertising
–blog post by AdReady’s Chief Scientist, Olly DownsOnline Display Advertising can be the natural progression from Search Advertising for Small and Medium Businesses looking to drive lead generation and direct customer conversion online. But relatively high CPCs and low direct conversion rates can lead advertisers to the conclusion that Display Advertising “just doesn’t work” for them.
Taking inspiration from the book “Moneyball” describing the Oakland A’s 2002 season, we explore how using principles that explore and optimize indirect pathways to conversion can result in different conclusions about Display Advertising. These principles guide AdReady’s Collective Insights platform.
Along the way we pick the 2011 World Series’ MVP, based on 2011 Regular Season Performance, and show why buying A-Rod just isn’t worth it!
Leveling the Playing Field
by Karl Siebrecht, CEO of AdReady
Doing digital marketing well is challenging. In particular, for advertisers with smaller budgets the challenges of mastering the art and science of digital marketing are plentiful — limited staffs, the burden of high fixed costs, media minimums, complexities associated with disparate technologies, etc. But perhaps the single greatest challenge facing smaller budget advertisers is one that is embedded in the very fabric of how the industry ecosystem operates. It’s what I call a structural disadvantage.
Put simply, small buys in ad exchanges very rarely benefit from the exchanges’ optimization algorithms, so they are structurally inhibited from performing well. Because smaller buys mean fewer impressions, and consequently fewer clicks and actions, there isn’t enough ‘signal’ about what’s working and what’s not for the optimization algorithms to determine how to optimize.
At our annual Partner Summit next week, we are announcing a new capability we call “Collective InsightsTM” that addresses this fundamental problem. By aggregating a wide range of data mined from the AdReady platform as well as external sources, we’re able to bring automated intelligence to bear on our clients’ smaller budget campaigns that amplifies their effectiveness across the traditional and social web. As BIA/Kelsey analyst Jed Williams puts it, “We have seen the challenges that prevent smaller advertisers from realizing their full potential with online display and social media campaigns. AdReady’s Collective Insights solution goes a long way to leveling the playing field.”
AdReady Discount Code for the Seattle Interactive Conference
In less than a week, Seattle will be host to one of the greatest conferences for anyone interested or related to the internet industry put on by the Seattle Interactive Conference.
A Little Information on SIC:
SIC brings the Internet Industry’s brightest leaders together in one of the world’s most innovative cities.
SIC provides a unique forum for entrepreneurs, developers, online business professionals, advertisers, producers, designers, artists, writers and thinkers to converge: Visionary speakers on technology, creativity, and emergent trends will leave you inspired, and networking events promise to better connect you
What This Means For You:
Because of AdReady’s unique partnership with SIC, we are able to offer you a massive discount on your registration fee. This event is normally $350 per attendee, but AdReady can offer you full access (not including the Gnomodex) for the entire conference and all the after parties for only $100!
All we ask is that if you are interested, you email us at marketing@adready.com
The Fine Print:
There is no catch, no sales pitch or gimmick. We just have a limited supply of these deeply discounted tickets we want to share with you! The best way to monitor our quantity is to have you email us for the link.
Feel free to share this great news and tell your friends. We will offer this discounted rate as long as we can, but don’t delay. The event is less than a week away and there is no one else offering such a massive price break.
Educational Institutions Divulge Their Digital Marketing Practices
AdReady and Stamats presented a sneak preview of preliminary results at the Stamats Integrated Marketing: Graduate School Marketing Conference in early July but will be releasing full findings on August 30th 2011.
Intriguing survey results collected from EDUs across the nation are soon to be revealed!
What types of questions did we answer?
- What are the most prominent trends occurring right now in educational marketing?
- How are traditional marketing budgets fairing against the eruption of digital opportunities?
- How are different types of institutions leveraging the various online advertising options available to them?
- Search versus display, who emerged triumphant? You may be surprised.
- Who’s employing the more complex display advertising techniques?
- How are your peers leveraging social media? Hint: Facebook’s usage rate? A whopping 92 percent.
Educational Institutions, what can you learn from your peers and what does 2013 hold for EDU marketers?
Discover the importance of display, how EDUs are defying advertising industry norms, and the pivotal role social media is claiming for itself in the digital advertising practices of Educational Institutions around the country.
Sign up now to receive the whitepaper when it is launched!
Measuring Your Display Ad Campaign’s Success, and Why You Are Likely Doing it Wrong
There are two ways of evaluating online display campaign success.
The traditional and highly prevalent way involves launching a standard Display Ad or “audience acquisition” campaign and judging it solely on how closely it has met action-oriented goals (such as CPA, CPM, CPC, etc.), ultimately deeming it either a ‘success’ or a ‘failure’ based on this information.
Due to the emergence of retargeting and what we will call your “online audience,” this traditional approach, although widely practiced, supplies marketers with an incomplete view of true display advertising performance.
Because of this, marketers need to immediately shift the way they evaluate their campaigns.
AdReady’s own Senior VP of Sales and Services, Randy Wootton, tackles this very issue in How much is that cookie in the window here, ultimately establishing the importance of incorporating additional factors, besides initial actions, into your assessment of display efforts.
Instead of judging campaigns by up front, immediate actions, the way marketers should be evaluating campaigns is in two stages. In Stage 1 you, the marketer, launch a display ad campaign and generate initial actions. At the same time, you are effectively building an online audience which can then be retargeted. In Stage 2, you put this “online audience” to use and leverage retargeting to generate additional actions and at a better scale.
To put this in perspective, imagine an audience acquisition campaign that generated a horrible CPA, however the media was unusually inexpensive and the online audience converted at an exceptionally high rate, that the overall campaign, when combined with retargeting, in fact surpassed other successful campaigns in your portfolio.
By stepping back and viewing the holistic workings of audience acquisition (Stage 1 standard display ad campaigns) plus retargeting (Stage 2), this will give you much more valuable and accurate insight into campaign success.
So why is this important?
Moving beyond the traditional way of assessing success, online marketers realize there is still an undeniable amount of untapped value in their online audience that will manifest itself at a later point in time when they are served retargeted ads.
So, even if there is poor direct, initial conversion, this by no means indicates the display advertising campaign was a failure.
What you may find is that, the high cost per actions you saw as an outcome of audience acquisition is drastically mitigated by the success you’ve achieved via retargeting your online audience.
An apparent failure, turned into a great victory.
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