Google display advertising, Facebook remarketing, AdRoll customer match campaigns — what do they all mean?
Display advertising is a huge field, and it can be tough to decide on the channels and marketing segments that will lead to the most revenue for your business. Fortunately, we do this for companies every day, and we would love to help you. Display ads are a necessary component of any healthy paid advertising campaign. They typically are less-expensive per-click than traditional search text ads and can drastically increase the number of impressions in your campaign.
We’ve written a comprehensive guide to display advertising below, and if you’d like to get started with highly profitable campaigns, call the experts here at Majux Marketing.
PPC vs. CPM in Display Advertising
You’ve probably heard digital marketers talk about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and cost-per-thousand (CPM) advertising, both in the context of display marketing. There is a difference.
In short, PPC advertisers are billed when their ad gets clicked, and CPM advertisers are billed per one thousand impressions. The former is ideal for lead-generation and ecommerce campaigns, while the latter is great if you have loftier branding goals in mind (when you simply want as many eyeballs on your ads as possible).
Google Ads and other platforms often give you a choice between the two, so you can pick your own poison if you’d like to. At Majux, we like the granular control given by the PPC model, so that’s what we usually choose when conducting PPC for law firms.
Display Ad Designs: What Works And What Doesn’t?
Here is the usual list of display advertising dimensions that you can use in Google Ads:
| 300 x 250 |
| 336 x 280 |
| 728 x 90 |
| 300 x 600 |
| 250 x 250 |
| 200 x 200 |
| 468 x 60 – Banner |
| 120 x 600 – Skyscraper |
Those ad dimensions cover all of the usual ad slots on a website, and if you have a talented designer, you can reallocate your images and text to fit each dimension nicely.
Regarding your ad copy, we usually recommend the same principles that we apply to search ads: make sure your copy aligns as closely with your audience as possible. If you are a bankruptcy lawyer, put “NYC Bankruptcy Lawyer” in the headline. Advertisers often outsmart themselves by trying to get cute. Ecommerce brands will sometimes have to think outside the box. You may want to tout an offer in your headline, and we often recommend that you broadcast your key differentiators as much as possible. You can’t just say, “Buy Used Cars,” you’d need to say “Used Cars With No Credit Check,” or “Used Cars Without a Salesman,” or something like that.
Lastly, pay attention to the images you choose. These can be far more important than your copy. At Majux, we always A/B test the creative assets used in a campaign; we’ll often test a flashy, edgy image alongside an edgy one, and the winner takes all.
Tip: flashy images always get a higher click through rate (CTR), but sometimes they attract irrelevant clicks, thereby increasing the actual cost per lead (CPL). Therein lies the value of an A/B test.
Google also created a relatively new tool for display advertisers:
Display Advertising Targeting – Who Sees Your Ads?
Display advertising platforms have gotten increasingly more intelligent over the years in regards to targeting, and that momentum isn’t slowing down any time soon. We won’t go over obvious targeting like geography, age, and gender, but here are some of the more interesting options at your disposal:
Google Custom Affinity: Google lets you build your own custom audiences of web users who have demonstrated an “affinity” for certain marketing segments, like gardening, car mechanics, gaming, and more.
Google Custom Intent Audiences: Create an audience of people who have recently been searching for your desired keywords on the web. In short, you feed Google a list of relevant keywords and URLs, and Google Ads does the rest.
Google Customer Match: Simply export a list of customer data from your CRM, WooCommerce, or some other platform and feed it to Google. This is a great option for upselling customers or getting people back into the fold.
Facebook Core Audiences: Facebook’s plethora of segments is too large to discuss in this article, but you can build audiences based on every interest category imaginable. Just make sure your ad creative is aligned with your audience!
Facebook Custom Audiences: This is where you build retargeting audiences in Facebook Business Manager. Once the Facebook Pixel is on your site, you can tell Facebook to advertise to people who visited the /shop, /contact, /blog section of your site, and more.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences: If you have a custom audience built in Facebook, you can tell Facebook to build another audience of people who behave similarly to the folks who already interacted with your site. You can even overlay this feature with the Facebook Core Audience segments mentioned above.
Adroll Targeting: AdRoll is a large display advertising platform independent from Google or Facebook (or Amazon, for that matter). Use can utilize their retargeting pixel, customer match feature, lookalike option, and contextual targeting to get customers visiting your site.
LinkedIn Targeting: The go-to option for many B2B advertisers, we’ve used LinkedIn to target potential leads by job title, the company they work for, their industry, and more. This is a fantastic option for companies who are trying to get webinar sign-ups or whitepaper downloads.
HTML5 Display Ads
HTML5 display ads is the new breed of animated advertising. They are constructed using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. These ads are beginning to become the new web standard. This is because of the ability to create beautifully animated and engaging content that can be viewed across desktop, smartphones, and tablets (unlike Flash). Google will soon not be supporting Flash ads. This is a major industry change in online advertising. Previously Flash was the only way to display animated ads on the internet. Starting January 2017, Flash ads will be unsupported by google and obsolete all together. This gives you the opportunity to take advantage of advertising with the new HTML5 ads before your competitors. Because these HTML5 ads will most likely be the only animated elements on a webpage, they draw the most attention which leads to clicks.
Our HTML5 ads are custom built animated ads that draw more attention than a traditional static ad. They use the newest web technologies to create complex yet light weight animations that traditional ads cannot match, while still being able to viewed on mobile and tablet devices. Clients love HTML5 display ads because they increase engagement from customers, which in-turn dramatically increases leads and conversions. HTML5 ads can also be custom tailored to different audiences. For example, you can run female focused imagery on ads for a female audience and male imagery for a male audience. This targeted advertising lets you engage with a distinct audience to maximize your click-through rates. Along with your attention grabbing ads, we can track clicks, impressions, browsers, mobile devices, countries, cities and much more useful data that we can then use to maximize your advertising costs. This is all done through our analytics tools and code we build into the ads themselves. HTML5 ads are the future of online advertising, and we’re at the forefront of this technology.
Here is an example:
Responsive Display Ads in Google Ads
You upload a set of contrasting images, logos, headlines, and ad copy to Google Ads, and their algorithm serves different pairings of these assets depending on the user who is viewing the ad. After a week or two, you can even see which images or headlines performed the best, and you can make edits as necessary.
Here’s the best part about responsive display ads: Google resizes these ads in real time, and because your ad can fit into literally any type of inventory on the web, your average cost per click (CPC) will be dramatically lower than traditional ads.
Facebook Display Ad Campaigns
Facebook display and remarketing ads require their own strategy. First, because Facebook has their own unique rules as to what can and can’t be in an ad. Things like wording, imagery and topic all are regulated closely by the Facebook advertising network. Facebook users also behave in a somewhat unique manner and are very sensitive to the message you push to them and the number of impressions they receive. Facebook ads also are able to be reported and commented on by the audience you are pushing them to. This means there has to be messaging, design and audience considerations when creating Facebook display ads. There is also strategy behind where you point and ultimately convert a Facebook user; whether it is to your own website or you convert them within Facebook.
We build ads in the Facebook and Instagram dashboard as usual, then check a box that allows these ads to show on partner websites.
Advertising on Youtube
YouTube, the world’s second-largest search engine, packs a powerful advertising punch when used correctly. We use your pre-existing video assets and YouTube channel to build campaigns in the Google Ads interface, and we can target users contextually or with one of Google’s targeting features mentioned above. Pre-roll, mid-roll, and bumper ads are all on the table – contact us to learn more.
Sponsored Display on Amazon
Amazon is perhaps the fastest growing advertising network available, and if you are an ecommerce brand, you have no choice but to play along.
Amazon has a number of display features for advertisers: sponsored product ads, headline ads, sponsored display (new), product display ads, and a few others. You can advertise with their search or display mechanisms, and if you already have a store set up on Amazon, you can get started with a very small advertising budget.
Contrary to popular thought, Amazon’s ecosystem is very different from Google; we recommend that you hire someone who has significant experience advertising on Amazon. Otherwise, you be tossing a lot of money to the wind.
Law Firm Display Advertising Has Unique Considerations
Majux Marketing has a strong reputation in the law firm SEO and paid media niche, so we decided to give that topic some extra thought.
Firstly, Google can be very picky about the language you use if you belong to a niche that Google considers “sensitive.” Unfortunately, bankruptcy, personal injury, and criminal defense firms fit into this category.
For instance, Google may limit your reach if your headline says, “Were You Seriously Injured?” or “Dealing With Bankruptcy?”. You may need to be more neutral in your headlines, and you’ll almost certainly have to test different sets of copy. You also can’t use images that are too on-the-nose; if you ad features an inmate in handcuffs, Google probably won’t show that ad.
Retargeting is even trickier. Google will very often (as in most of the time) shut down law firm display retargeting audiences completely in Google Analytics, so we have had to turn to AdRoll and Facebook to meet the remarketing needs of our law firm partners.
We have a huge amount of experience dealing with these issues, and we’ve figured out some industry-leading methods for reaching your audience without offending Google. Get in touch if you’d like to set up a consultation regarding display advertising for lawyers.
How We Optimize, or Improve, Your Campaigns
The work is only beginning when we launch a display advertising campaign. We conduct quality assurance (QA) audits on your campaigns and traffic on a daily basis, and we take a close look at the website your ads are showing on and behavior of the web users who are clicking on your ads.
If your ad gets 50 clicks from a particular website without a phone call or sale, we can block that website from our campaign. We can also exclude mobile apps and YouTube channels — those two mediums are notorious for garnering accidental clicks or the attention of children who simply borrowed their parent’s internet-enabled device.
We’ll also look at the ZIP codes that drive the best engagement, the best times of day, and the demographics of your top-performing audiences, and we tip more budget into the areas that drive results.
There’s a lot more to it than that, but we constantly track your KPIs and make changes to your campaigns so that you get the highest return on your investment.
How We Track Results
All of the information is certainly interesting, but it ultimately doesn’t matter if your campaigns don’t drive sales or leads. That’s why we measure the results closely.
We implement web tracking prior to the launch of every campaign, and we even layer call tracking on top of our usual Google Analytics implementation. We calculate the cost per sale or cost per lead of every campaign, and we constantly optimize accounts to make sure they are performing well.
Lastly, we build a Google Data Studio dashboard that you can access at any time, and we are always happy to answer your questions. We don’t report on metrics like impressions or clicks — we send you data based on what is making money.
Contact The Display Advertising Experts At Majux Marketing
Are you ready to reach new audiences, increase revenue, and grow your business? Contact us about display advertising today – we’d be happy to have a free initial consultation.
