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Strategy

We put great emphasis on creating a strategy which allows us to introduce our clients' brands to the right audience on a contextual, behavioural, geographic or demographic basis. As standard, we would:

Establish Client KPI Expectations

Establish Target Demographics & Geographics

Brainstorm Suitable Publishers & Advertising Networks

Determine Brand & Creative Messaging

Determine Pricing Structure

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Establish Client KPI Expectations

There are generally two core objectives when launching a display advertising campaign.

• Creating awareness to a brand, product or service
• Driving acquisitions (leads or sales)

Awareness

Display ads drive customer interaction with your brand. Good ad placements put you in front of your target audience and raise subconscious awareness as they go about their daily routine. Ubiquity of the brand proposition is achieved through display ads by enabling users to develop a rapport with your brand.

In this case the key KPI is likely to be exposure and engagement driven.

Driving Acquisitions

Ad placements allow you to drive acquisitions to users who are not necessarily in the buying cycle. It's a good source of gaining new customers, as well as re-marketing to users who already have awareness of your brand.

We're focused on metrics and our detailed analysis makes it possible to refine your ads to complement each step of the user journey. You can be alongside your customer at every touchpoint from impression, through each click until conversion. 

To analyse and measure display ads correctly, we apply conversion attribution. Often users will not react immediately upon seeing a display ad, but might buy through another channel at a later date.

Ensuring ads are rewarded for contributing to the conversion path will mean marketing budgets are distributed appropriately, and will give you a better assessment of ROI over various channels.

For acquisition focused display campaigns, we can establish a target CPA and create a performance metrics tree, just like we do with PPC.

Even with attribution in place, due to the speculative nature of display advertising it is likely to have a higher CPA than other digital channels.

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Establish Target Demographics & Geographics

Like all forms of push marketing, establishing the profile of individual(s) you'd like to target and where you'd like to target them is extremely important. Excluding search retargeting and remarketing, there generally isn't a trigger or indication of intent to help target your advertising.

We use all of the information available to us from the client to determine our ideal demographics and geographic regions. This not only helps us with targeting the ads, it also helps us get the creative, messaging and tone of voice right.

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Brainstorm Suitable Publishers & Advertising Networks

As part of the strategy we need to decide what advertising inventory we would like to use based on the target audience and KPIs for the campaign.

There are two main ways to target your ideal audience and inventory:

• Target specific sites. Often we may create relationships directly with a handful of sites which attract our client's ideal audience and appropriately represents their brand and proposition.
  
  In most cases, we would be buying reserved inventory. With reserved inventory we are able to buy in advance for a set price. This form of display buying is very similar to buying print space in a newspaper. We do however often have to pay a slight premium for the ability to choose which space we want, when we want it and how often we want it.
  
  The main benefits of buying reserved inventory is that we have full control and we are able to plan budgets and exposure much more easily.

• Target a particular audience. If we are interested in buying an audience, across numerous publishers, then we would engage with an ad network.
  
  In this scenario we would be buying non-reserved inventory which is where ad space is bought through an auction when it's available. Non-reserved inventory can be bought through either display networks or exchanges.
  
  Exchanges basically sell unsold space through an auction in real time. Exchanges are a great way for publishers to milk any last minute value from their unused inventory.
  
  The main benefits of buying non-reserved inventory is that it can be bought across multiple sites, usually from one platform, giving greater reach and scale.

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Determine Brand & Creative Messaging

Our main objective is to ensure that our creative route compliments the chosen audience and publisher sites. We then create banners that exploit any existing brand equity and are consistent with any other marketing campaigns in the public domain.

A great analogy is to consider display ads like the posters you see along the escalators in the tube - people are moving by so quickly that you need to be impactful in order to grab their attention.

We aim to create eye-catching designs, with a strong and compelling headline. We try to keep messaging short, sharp and concise with a strong call to action where applicable. In this case, less is definitely more!

Wherever possible, we also try and introduce animation. Motion is a very effective way to grab attention. It also creates an opportunity to get potential consumers engaged with our clients' brands right from the onset.

For the ultimate user engagement and interaction we can introduce a games, roll-over functionality or even a form within the ad creative. See some examples of our work here.

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Determine Pricing Structure

We define the pricing model which best compliments the objectives of the campaign. There are predominantly three core pricing models to consider:

• CPM. CPM is short for 'cost per thousand' impressions ('M' being the Roman numeral for thousand). We would use the CPM pricing structure where the primary goal of the campaign is building awareness.
• CPC. CPC means 'cost per click'. We would use the CPC pricing structure when the primary goal of the campaign is to drive traffic to a website or landing page.
• CPA. CPA stands for 'cost per acquisition'. Not surprisingly, we would use this pricing structure if the primary objective of the campaign is to drive traffic to a website or landing page and complete some form of action.

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