Search or Display - What Should First Time Advertisers Use?
Search advertising or display advertising: What is the best choice for first time advertisers who want to promote their products
Companies / startups trying to promote their products are often faced with various advertising choices. Do Google search ads work better or does banner advertising (also known as display advertising) work better?. Newer entrants like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn ads have added to the available choices. So how does one choose the best platform to start advertising?
You must have a clear goal before you get started. What are you looking to achieve? Is it acquisition of new users, to promote your brand awareness amongst a specific target audience or is it simply to drive new visits to your website.
Performance Marketers, Agencies and Ad Platforms
If your goal is to simply acquire users, your best option may be to work with performance marketers/advertising platforms who work on a cost per acquisition basis. Such platforms typically charge you per sign-up, call or per sale. Keep in mind that while these platforms will deliver you users or sign-ups they will not guarantee about what kind of sites or content received the ad. What this means is your ad might appear within undesirable content or sites.
Search advertising is controlled mostly by Google and it works by putting ads targeting specific keywords. The key thing about search advertising is that you cannot brand your site using search and it almost always is displayed around some user generated activity such as searching for something.
Using Display Advertising For Your Branding Campaigns
If your goal is to promote your brand, raise awareness about your product or to reach specific target audiences then you might want to consider working with display advertising platforms. Display advertising platforms typically buy inventory on an auction model from various advertising exchanges or publishers. Learn more about Programmatic advertising through our previous blog entry.
The key thing with a programmatic platform is that media is bought only when the right target audience has been identified. If not that impression can be rejected. Target audience may be identified not only by targeting parameters but also by audience demographics and variables which might describe the audience.
A note about Facebook Ads: Facebook ads are also display ads because they are shown to the users based on the user profile and less around the kind of content that the user is searching or viewing.
Data Driven, Audience Segmentation and Programmatic Optimization Are Driving Display Advertising
Display advertising is optimized by leveraging third party / first party audience data and is typically bought either through a direct placement at a flat price or programmatically using a real-time bidding (RTB) auction. A programmatic auction leads to more efficient buys of audiences that are extremely relevant leading to better ROI. Modern display platforms also process large data identifying patterns leading to improved placement of ads.
Data driven optimization, audience targeting and programmatic buying are primary reasons why Display can be a better choice if harnessed properly.
Facebook Ads And Google Adwords
Google ad words or Facebook ads are becoming the two common small business platforms to deliver advertising.
Through Google adwords and Facebook, you can buy search, display or social ad units. These are great choices for advertisers who want to spend small amounts increment each month and wanting to manage their advertising by themselves. Both platforms allow you to reach a specific target audience without detailed optimization. For example if you want your campaign to meet a certain cost per acquisition goal or a certain click through rate, it may not be possible to do it well. Also, these platforms tend to be at a disadvantage when it comes to larger media spends simply because they are tuned to sell ad space and not tuned to help your campaign succeed at the lowest possible rates.
Our suggestion is that you do not use these platforms directly when you’re ad spends are fairly large. Reasons are explained in the next paragraph.
Google and Facebook are both the sellers in this process and clearly it is in their best interest that they sell the advertising space at the highest possible price. Most small advertisers tend to ignore this fact and this plays a role in the pricing. You may be buying media at prices higher than you should be. You may be buying all matching users at the same price whereas the value of the users might really be different. For example someone might take a lot more time (and ad spend) whereas a user might take a lot less time to convert. Would you buy both users at the same price? Would you buy ad space which is higher priced which could have been bought for a far lower price?
If you have small budgets, say less than $2000 a month, it makes sense to use search based or Facebook ads and buy media directly. Make sure that you track campaign performance on a day-to-day basis to ensure that your campaigns are meeting your performance goals.
When you have large at spends or want performance and yet have some branding goals, we would recommend you to work with a Demand Side Platform (DSP, like Reduce Data) that can help you buy media programmatically. Such media is typically optimized to meet your campaign goals, through an auction where advertising is bought on a per impression basis.
The ability to buy media on a per impression basis vis-à-vis a standby has big advantages simply because you only buy audiences that are necessary for you ignore those which are irrelevant. Secondly, the ability to buy through an auction means you can value the user and buy the user at a higher value when necessary or buy the user at a low value when the user is not valuable enough.
Read about programmatic advertising to understand how modern display advertising platforms work. Without a clear understanding, you might end up spending a lot of money and not see satisfactory results.
Key Tools That Might Help You Advertise Better
· Keyword planner tool: Google has an interesting tool called keyword planner tool which allows you to input a range of keywords or keyword groups and get estimates of all related keywords.This removes a lot of guesswork in trying to understand the campaign.
· Use Google analytics' custom Dashboards: Google analytics is a very impressive tool that has a lot of features to help track website visitor data. Its dashboards / custom dashboards offer can be customized on a per site basis. If you have different landing pages for different campaign you can create different custom dashboard for each campaign with metrics relevant to the campaign. Google analytics also allows you to import third-party data to use within the dashboard.
· Ad serving tools: Some advertisers prefer to use third-party ad serving tools in order to aggregate all ad serving in a single location for spends on different platforms. Tools like DoubleClick DART, Flash talking, site Scout are commonly used.
· Advertising Analytics, Verification and Attribution tools: It is not uncommon to use Google analytics as an advertising analytics tool for adwords based campaigns however, you cannot use it for regular display advertising campaigns. In order to aggregate and analyze campaigns you can use an ad serving solution with basic reporting or a full-blown advertising analytics solution that audits and verifies your ad spends independently. Most of these solutions are typically useful if your campaign budget is large and tools like Adometry, Comscore, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Doubleverify are commonly used.
· Performance tools for Mobile: Performance tracking tools can help track performance of mobile advertising campaigns and to improve ROI from an independent point of view. This becoming common with most performance mobile advertising campaigns where the advertiser is promoting a mobile app. Tools like HasOffers, Kochava etc are the most commonly used tools.
· Mobile Analytics: Sometimes it makes sense to use a separate proven mobile analytics solution because Google analytics may not serve the purpose for mobile apps based campaigns. In this case you might want to use a full-blown mobile analytics such as Flurry to get deeper insight into your visitors.
Ready To Start Advertising?
Reduce Data is a programmatic advertising platform that leverages big data to deliver significantly better ROI.
Learn more about it at http://reducedata.com