Display Advertising – The new traditional online advertising

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Display Advertising – The new traditional online advertising

Many will remember the days before sponsored advertising, huge shopping comparison engines and dominate search engines. These were the days of Display Advertising.

Considerably expensive, hard to measure and even harder to get a Return on Investment.

Display advertising was the right solution at the right time though. Before the internet; many marketers invested considerably with traditional advertising such as TV, Radio and Print. The only way to measure these efforts was by forecasting impressions. This being the case, display advertising had an added value to at least be able to provide specific impression counts and even some sporadic sales data.

Along comes cost per click and cost per sale advertising. With the ability to measure the specific return on marketing dollar investment, these solutions became far more desirable. Display advertising was relegated only to the most exclusive branding campaigns.

Who could blame marketers for allocating budgets towards such a measurable and targeted sales channel? Compare an impression based campaign results against a good CPC campaign and it’s difficult to argue the merit of impressions to a CFO.

Unfortunately, there has been too much of a shift towards CPC and CPA. The market is affectively too competitive and many of the traditional channels true benefits have either been forgotten or were never understood in the first place. Many small to mid size businesses cannot efficiently compete for Sponsored Advertising placement against “Big Boxes” no matter how savvy they are.

The reasons for this are many but in my opinion, the primary reason is the downturn in the economy.

“Big Boxes” still have their roots in traditional advertising. They understand the value of customer loyalty and lifetime value. Their interest is more on customer acquisition then on return on investment. Therefore, they are willing to take a marketing loss on initial sales in order to either drive the customer to the store or retain customer information for future sales offerings.

Due to the current climate, there has been resurgence in Display Advertising. These changes have adopted the measurable practices of CPC solutions. Many of which are provided at a cost per sale option. An entire industry has developed based on customer loyalty display advertising and customer retargeting/remarketing. Even Google has launched a version of this by utilizing its extensive Double Click and YouTube networks.

It is understandable if marketers are apprehensive about display advertising. Many have not seen results in the past or have not been exposed to ways to measure traditional advertising.

Consider the plight of print advertising. We all know the affects the internet has had on Newspapers and Magazines. Before the internet’s popularity, display Ads was their chief source of revenue. Now with more people getting their news online, print advertising is more reliant than ever on Banner Advertising to survive.

Online News in particular is an increasing desirable area to consider.  People have not stopped reading news articles; they just are not picking it up from their front porch in the morning. Combine the Social media sites and you can see the potential. Facebook after all is the most visited site on the planet.

Even if the display advertising is built on cost per thousand (CPM), there are ways to properly measure the results to ROI. The most important thing to remember when evaluating display advertising is that you know you’re demographic and be just as selective with your Ads as you would be with keywords on sponsored advertising. You will also want to have a specific figure for what the customer lifetime value is. By properly managing a display advertising campaign, you will level the playing field with the “Big Boxes” and can uncover far more cost effective customer acquisition channels.

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