Author Archives for Jacob Young

Suzanne is the Marketing Coordinator at WhatRunsWhere and manages their Affiliate Program.  She has a degree in Communications Studies and 5+ years of marketing experience with a focus on digital advertising.  Read more from Suzanne at https://blog.whatrunswhere.com or follow her on Twitter @WhatRunsWhere.

Display ads are everywhere. We see them when we’re online shopping, when we’re reading the news on our phones and even when we’re doing research for our jobs. eMarketer predicts that the U.S. will spend $37.36 billion on display ads by 2017. With this in mind, there’s no doubt that display advertising isn’t going away any time soon.

According to ComScore, Internet users see an average of 1,707 banner ads per month. So how do you make sure yours stand out from the competition and yield the results you want? Follow this guide to develop an effective display ad strategy and you’ll be well on your way to a winning campaign.

Phase One: Planning

1. Define your goals

It’s nearly impossible to build a strategy if you don’t have an objective in mind. What are you hoping to accomplish with your display ads? Are you looking for conversions or leads? Are sales your main goal? Brand lift? Maybe you just want to increase your web traffic. Whatever your goal, make it something measurable. For example, instead of saying you want to increase traffic to your website, try aiming for a specific number of visits to your site per month. Keeping your goals top of mind will make it easier to develop a cohesive strategy and will help you measure your success throughout your campaign.

2. Know your audience

It’s important to cater your strategy to your audience, but before you can do this, you need to know your audience’s interests, behaviors and buying habits. This information will inform how you design your ads, what messaging to use, and where to host them.
Start by deciding what publishers are relevant for your audience. Ask yourself which sites your customers likely visit and what type of content they read online. Don’t forget to check which publishers your competitors are advertising on. Once you’ve established which publishers work best for reaching your audience, you should find out if a direct media buy is available, or if you’d benefit from having your ad served through a network. You can then look into different networks to serve your ads for you.

3. Research, research, research

Whether it’s market research about your audience, competitive intelligence on your competitors’ strategy or trending topics in your industry, this step is integral to your overall campaign success. It allows you to become an expert on your audience, industry and your competition.
If your audience frequents online resources often, you want to know what networks can serve your ads there. If there’s an online publication trending in the industry, you want to see if they have any ad inventory available for purchase. When it comes to your competition, you can learn from their mistakes and capitalize on their success if you are well-informed about their strategy. Understand what your competitors are offering so that you can develop a competitive offer for your own business.

Phase Two: Executing

1. Diversify your online strategy

Use a variety of ad sizes and formats

Don’t just run 300×250 pixel banner ads for your online display campaign. Stay on top of current trending ad types and incorporate them into your online strategy for 2016.
Lululemon does a great job of using banner ads (Figure 1), native ads (Figure 2) and text ads (Figure 3) in various sizes. Different ad sizes and formats will yield different results and give you an understanding of what works best for your audience so you can optimize your strategy for success.

Figure 1 (Source: WhatRunsWhere)

Figure 2 (Source: WhatRunsWhere)

Figure 3 (Source: WhatRunsWhere)

Don’t forget about native, rich media and mobile

Some stats to keep in mind:

• Native ads were viewed 53% more than traditional banner ads (Source: HubSpot)
• While the average click-through rate (CTR) is 0.06 across all ad formats and placements, rich media ads yield a 0.27% CTR (Source: Smart Insights)
• Native ads that include rich media boost conversion rates by up to 60% (Source: HubSpot)
• Statistica estimates that mobile advertising spend will reach $59.67 billion by 2017

Neglecting native, rich media and mobile when it comes to your display strategy means ignoring lucrative opportunities for your business. You can’t afford to not be taking advantage of these ad channels.

Try Retargeting

Users who are retargeted are 70% more likely to convert (HubSpot). Don’t neglect the people who have already shown interest in your product or service. Bring them back to your landing page and convert them as customers.

2. Build powerful ads and landing pages

Develop a strong Call-To-Action (CTA)

You’ll want to develop a strong CTA to ensure your audience interacts with your ad and engages with your landing page. Your ad’s CTA should entice your audience to click, while your landing page’s CTA should encourage them to take a specific action. For example, your ad CTA can be as simple as “learn more” and your landing page CTA “download this e-book now”.

Keep your design and messaging clutter-free

Both your ads and your landing pages should be simple, clear and concise. While they should be eye-catching, you’ll want to avoid clutter. Check out this example from Ford (Figure 4). The ad is simple and clear, using minimal text. The CTA is clear: Explore the All-New F-150. The CTA is contained in a clickable button, stands out in orange, and is in a viewable position.

Figure 4 (Source: WhatRunsWhere)

Keep your ads and landing pages consistent

Your landing page should appear as an extension of your ad. Your branding should be consistent, along with your subject matter. You wouldn’t want someone to click on an ‘order now’ CTA on an ad for a pair of shoes and be taken to a landing page where you can only order jackets. When a user clicks on the Ford ad (Figure 4), they’re taken to a landing page (Figure 5) dedicated to the F-150, equipped with everything you’d want to know about this truck.

Figure 5 (Source: WhatRunsWhere)

Optimize your landing page for conversions

✓  Make your landing page user-friendly and easy to navigate
✓  Highlight the features and benefits of the product or service you’re promoting
✓  Explain what makes you different from your competitors
✓  Have a strong CTA that appears above the fold

3. Test to optimize

Display advertising is not a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of thing. You should constantly be monitoring, testing and updating your campaigns for optimal success.
Try hosting the same ad on 3 different publishers to see which publisher yields the highest click-through rate for your ad.
Use publishers in different categories to see which ones resonate best with your audience.
Build identical ads with different call-to-actions to see which generates the most interactions. For instance, test ‘shop now’ and ‘buy now’ to see which one yields more clicks. Analyze different designs and messaging (Figure 6), different ad sizes and different ad placements.

Figure 6 (Source: WhatRunsWhere)

Split-testing can help you capitalize on what works for your campaign while eliminating what doesn’t; and it doesn’t have to be limited to your ads. You can split-test your landing pages as well. Experiment with different CTAs, images and page layout. You’ll be amazed at the difference changing something as simple as one word can make.
Phase Three: Measuring ROI

1. Track Conversions

How are you measuring your success for your display ad strategy? What are your KPIs? If you’re looking for form fill outs, you’ll need to ensure you have a way to track the number of completed submissions. If you’re looking for users to download a resource, try adding a conversion pixel to the ‘download complete’ page so you can measure how many downloads resulted from your display campaign. If you’re measuring success based on traffic to your landing page, you can set up UTM codes to track the traffic that was referred to your page from your display campaign. Be sure to note all the ways in which your campaign delivered ROI, beyond your initial goals. Maybe your ad was promoting your affiliate program, but some of the people who clicked on your ad ended up subscribing to your blog.

2. Reporting

There are all kinds of metrics for measuring online display advertising that you should consider for your overall campaign analysis. You’ll want to develop a reporting system that measures all your KPIs and update it regularly. The more information you collect, the more information you have available to help plan for future campaigns. Keep track of your split-testing results, record your costs vs. revenue, and be sure to share the results with your team. Reports allow you to identify areas that need more work and they will likely spark new ideas for future strategies.

3. Learn and improve

Take some time to sit down with your campaign results monthly and identify areas for improvement. Record what worked well and what didn’t. Build your strategy based on these findings. Implement optimizations that will make the campaign stronger. Identify ways to increase conversions based on your historical data. Debriefing with your team will help you leverage past successes and learn from previous mistakes.

Now that you’re all set, what are you waiting for? Put these steps into action and build a successful display ad strategy for 2016 and beyond.

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This summer, Google Analytics released some new features. You’re as much of an analytics pro as the next guy — or, the next guy reading the Zebo blog, at least — so you should know what the new bells and whistles are all about. Some of them are API changes that’ll mostly be relevant to large agencies and power users, but there’s also the Chrome Extension, which is handy. Read on to learn more.

Chrome extension makes in-page analytics more convenient

If it was cumbersome to study in-page analytics before, Google has made it simpler with their new Chrome extension.

Load up the free extension, and now, when you visit a site whose analytics account you’re logged into, you can see your metrics dashboard and an overlay of who’s clicking where.

You can add the in-page analytics Chrome extension here.

Data import feature lets you bring together multiple business systems

When you run a complex business, the website and its analytics are often just one part of the picture. A few examples of things you can do with data import:

• Upload inventory data and tie it into website analytics
• Import cost data from advertising networks
• Upload values after a transaction happens, like total customer spend, last purchase date or a loyalty score

Here’s how you get started with data import for Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Premium customers benefit from DoubleClick integration

If you’re running display ads via DoubleClick, this integration is exciting because it empowers you to go deeper than the run-of-the-mill last-click attribution that tends to obscure the role of display advertising in your conversion funnel.

The new reports available will allow you to get a more holistic picture of how display factors into your customer’s path to purchase.

3 new APIs to simplify analytics for large businesses

Embed API

This API is meant for creating custom dashboards in your own applications, as in the example below.

AdWords linking API

If you’ve been an SEM manager of any kind, you probably know you can link analytics and AdWords. You’ve also probably been in a situation where a simple link / unlink function isn’t enough, especially when multiple advertising accounts and analytics profiles enter the picture.

AdWords Links in the Management API allows you to get, list, create, update and delete links between Google AdWords accounts and Google Analytics properties and manage which views (profiles) to populate with AdWords data.

Provisioning API

This API lets you programmatically create new analytics accounts. It’s intended for service providers with many clients to be able to quickly and automatically create GA instances, and it’s available by invite only.

Now you’re clued in. So tweet this post and get back to work!

This is a guest post by Rakesh Soni, CEO and co-founder of LoginRadius – the fastest growing social platform offering social sign-on, social sharing, user data and social analytics.

Know your consumer base. The most basic of business rules we all live or die by.

And what do we need in order to know who our online users are?

Consumer data, consumer data and more consumer data, of course.

Marketing teams spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to understand their user base, what they want, how to reach them and how to keep them coming back.

The most common way marketers have collected online user data has been, until now, via sign-up forms. Yet we know that around 80%* of users dislike traditional registration forms and most of them will enter incorrect or false information.

As a result, marketers are well aware that asking users to fill out more than five data fields is really pushing their luck. So the question remains – how can I get more, reliable consumer data?

Social networks have finally found a solution for us, and it is simple: offer social sign-on – also known as social login – on your website.

Social login allows users to register on websites using their existing social network IDs – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. – giving them a hassle-free online experience by removing the need to complete another sign-up form or remember yet another set of passwords.

Offering social login on your sites gives you access to more than 200 data points, including verified email addresses, gender, age, relationship status and personal interests.

With verified information at your fingertips, businesses can truly revolutionize their marketing strategies. Let’s look at five ways how.

1. Understand who your users are

Consumer data is absolutely key to knowing exactly who your users are and being able to strategize and plan around that information.

But until recently, website owners had been faced with an uphill challenge when it came to collecting accurate and detailed data.

Even if you managed to persuade someone to fill out a registration form in the first place, there’s an 88% chance they’ll enter incomplete or falsified information.

But the arrival of Facebook Connect in 2008 completely changed the login and data game. With users able to carry their personal data with them around the web, website owners can now tap into far more useful and accurate data on a scale never thought possible before.

Social login gives you access to hundreds of data points straight from the user’s profile, including verified email address, personal interests, name, gender, age, location and language.

With access to quality, first-party data, marketing teams can develop better strategies and targeted campaigns.

2. Segment your user base

In a world with more niche markets, intense competition and more demanding consumers, market segmentation is both essential and increasingly complex.

With a wealth of social data, marketers are now able to constantly analyze their user base. They can segment them in multiple groups and conduct targeted strategies and campaigns.

For example, you can target even more defined groups – such as selecting female only users aged between 20 and 25 who live in a particular region and are interested in beauty products – giving you a competitive advantage.

This will in turn translate into a high return on investment (ROI) on your marketing campaigns and higher satisfaction among your users because the get relevant content.

User segmentation also empowers management to build business strategies.

3.  Personalize the user experience

Social data gives you a direct connection with your user – instead of just selling to consumers you can now build a relationship with another human being whom you are growing to understand.

In today’s marketing landscape, there’s been a shift from old-fashioned B2C (business to consumer) selling models to H2H (human to human) relationships.

Businesses that personalize users’ web experiences around their interests and demographics record a 19 per cent increase in sales.

Social login allows you to map a user’s visits to your site, enabling you to better predict his or her online behaviours and intentions, and then build a personalized experience for that particular user.

4. Target email marketing campaigns 

Forward-thinking brands are already delivering targeted emails based on the superior data received through social login.

Once you have segmented your user base and mapped their past activities on your site, you are now in a position to send out targeted email offers to drive up engagement and revenue.

Clearly it makes sense to not only follow up on a sale, but to also offer the user related items they may be interested in.

If you have sold someone a top of the range cell phone, why aren’t you recommending cases, headphones and other accessories by email?

People are quick to hit the unsubscribe button if you send them irrelevant emails too often, running informed and targeted email campaigns is essential if you are to retain your users.

5. Gather leads (prospect information) on landing pages 

So at this stage, you’re pulling in stacks of data. You can segment your user base and personalize the user experience. Now, I want talk about how you can use social login to capture leads on a marketing landing page.

We all make beautiful landing pages with very effective messaging to attract prospects, but there’s one problem we all face: prospects don’t fill out the form or, even if they do, they enter incorrect information.

So we know nothing about the prospect, limiting our sales team’s ability to gather warm leads, nevermind close deals. That’s a significant impact on sales, isn’t it?

Well, social login can help you fix that by asking your prospects to connect with their social accounts before downloading content, participated in a webinar or taking part in any other ‘call to action’ you have on your landing page.

So now, instead of filling out a registration form, your prospects just connect to their social account in a couple of seconds.

Offering social login on landing pages will eliminate fake users and gather a wealth of correct  data about your prospects.

Your sales team would love that, wouldn’t they?

To learn more about how social login can improve the user experience on your landing pages, check out this post.

If you weren’t addicted to users’ social data before, you should be now.