Category: Advertising Help & Advice

B2B display ad spotted in the wild

Just ran across a great example of B2B display advertising. It’s an ad from Acquisio promoting a webinar. The ad appeared alongside a very relevant article on SearchEngineLand.
 

 
This is a great example of top-of-funnel marketing and is totally in line with what we’ve been saying about B2B display advertising. If I’m reading a trade journal article about display advertising, I might very well be interested in watching a webinar on retargeting.
 

 
And contrary to what many Display Ad Nay-sayers (we’ve all met them and suffered their withering, narrow-minded criticisms) might think, the ad itself is tasteful and unobtrusive. It serves as a supplement to the article, instead of trying to distract the reader from the content. That’s a key idea to keep in mind when running B2B display ads: don’t expect to “wow” the viewer into clicking your ad or absorbing your message. Offer a meaningful message in a professional context; offer something that a B2B buyer might actually find valuable in their search for products and services. Remember, the average B2B buyer is spending at least several thousand dollars, so they probably won’t be enticed in the same simplistic ways that Groupon entices you with cheeseburger & sushi ads.

I dug into the page code, and it looks like this ad was running on the Google Display Ad Network, perhaps on a straightforward contextual basis, meaning that it might show up when the page content includes very industry-specific terms like “display advertising” or “display ecosystem.”
 

No Comments by on February 20, 2012
filed in Advertising Help & Advice, Thoughts & Commentary
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MixRank: see your competitors’ most successful ads


 

 
Do you have competitors who advertise online? What a stupid question. Yes, of course you do. If you want to get the most out of your advertising, you need to be acutely aware of what your competitors are doing. You’ve probably got at least several dozen competitors, all constantly creating, testing, and optimizing ads and buying space on new websites. If you can find out what’s working well for your them, you should probably try it yourself.
 

Detail on a banner ad being run by Shopify.com.
 
MixRank gives you data on where your competitors are advertising and which ads are working the best. Just go to MixRank.com and type in any keyword or company URL to get a full competitive report. You can see search ads, display ads, basically anything that runs on Google (and they’ll be adding more ad networks soon).

Let your competitors spend the money to figure out what works best and then reap the rewards of their trial & error.

We’re not encouraging you to plagiarize your competitors’ ads (you’re better than that), but if your ads are under-performing (which you found out by going to MixRank), you might be able to look at your competitors’ best-performing ads get some insight into what’s resonating with your target audience. And if a competitor is getting an insane CTR on a website that you don’t currently advertise on, or with a keyword you’re not using, well then maybe you should start.
 

Detail on Shopify.com’s text ad performance.
 
Best of all, dear Internet people, MixRank is totally free. If you want to get serious, you can upgrade to MixRank’s paid version and get a helluva lot more data on your competitors.

May the best ads win!
 

1 Comment by on January 26, 2012
filed in Advertising Help & Advice
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How to use display ads for B2B marketing and lead gen


 
Had a piece published on BtoB Magazine’s website yesterday. The inspiration came from walking the floor at Salesforce.com’s 2011 Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. We talked to countless marketing automation vendors, and very few had any clue about display advertising. It was all email, email, email (oh, and one vendor touted a tracking solution for newspaper ads…how cutting edge). The whole marketing/salesforce automation industry seemed to be stuck 10-15 years in the past. Virtually no one we spoke with was familiar with “retargeting” (or “remarketing” if that’s your bag), despite the fact that it’s one of the best B2B marketing tools to come along in years.

Apparently, further education is needed.
 

We asked Neil Young, and he didn’t know what retargeting was, either.
 
What makes display advertising so great for B2B marketing? It’s the targeting. Just a few years ago, when you ran display ads, you had no option but to buy relatively broad swaths of ad space on specific websites (or sub-sections thereof). This could get you in the ballpark in terms of audience, but if you bought 100,000 impressions on some trade journal like Plastics & Rubber Weekly, you still didn’t really know who was seeing your ads. Imagine any given viewer and think of all the buckets they could fall into:

  • Existing customer
  • Competitor’s customer, researching alternatives
  • Ready to upgrade
  • Deeply familiar with the ins and outs of your solution
  • First week on the job and looking for answers
  • Rubber fetishist; went to the wrong website
  • And so forth…

Wouldn’t it be awesome to know which bucket each viewer belonged in? However, when you don’t know these details about your viewers, you’re forced to employ lowest-common-denominator ad content filled with cliches and platitudes that everyone ignores (“Results-driven enterprise-class solutions”…generate your own here). The result? No one pays any attention to your ad and no one clicks on it. You’ve wasted your ad dollars, and you might mistakenly blame the medium (display advertising), but it was really the targeting that fell short.

And targeting is extremely important in B2B marketing. The audience for industrial plastic extrusion and thermoforming solutions is quite small when compared to the audience for Ford trucks, but it’s probably worth several billion dollars a year, so there’s a lot at stake.

I don’t claim that display advertising will, by itself, sell complex B2B products and services. No one says that about print ads or email either. But if you can target display ad viewers on an individual level, then the whole web becomes like an inbox. You can show messages to your prospects all day long if you want (actually, this isn’t a good idea; there are lots of targeting and frequency capping techniques available to make sure you’re not overwhelming your audience with ads).

Compelling cheat-sheet:
 

 
More helpful reading on this blog:

 
Some vendors you might want to check out:

 

No Comments by on January 24, 2012
filed in Advertising Help & Advice, Press Coverage
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Why Canned Banners is a must-have for local online ad sales teams


 
Every local online ad sales team needs to have a fast, easy way to create ads for clients. It’s a really simple way to shorten their sales cycle and generate interest from prospects. Get the full story in 5 minutes (it’s narrated, so turn on your audio).

Here’s the banner preview link referenced in the deck: www.cannedbanners.com/saved/view/2369.
 

Canned Banners for Local Ad Sales Teams
View more webinars from cannedbanners

 

No Comments by on August 1, 2011
filed in Advertising Help & Advice, Thoughts & Commentary
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The Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors

This blog is normally about banner advertising, but I spotted this infographic from Search Engine Land and it was just too cool not to share.

The infographic is all about search engine optimization (or SEO). SEO is all about how easy it is for search engines to find your website, and how highly you rank in “organic” search results (i.e., the “natural” search results that you don’t pay for).

SEO is an extremely important piece of your overall online marketing strategy. If you can rank highly for a profitable search term like women’s shoes, you could make millions (perhaps billions) of dollars without ever spending a dime on advertising.

OK, enough stressing how important SEO is. Here’s a quick explaination of how it works:

When you search for “used cars” on Google, how exactly does Google find all the web pages that are relevant to “used cars” and then rank those pages in order of relevance? This is done using formulas known as “search algorithms.” These algorithms take into account an increasingly complex set of factors that go far beyond just scanning a page for keywords. This infographic tells you which factors search engines are looking for and how important they are in determining where your website ranks in all those pages of search results:
 

 
Questions? Contact us here.
 

No Comments by on June 24, 2011
filed in Advertising Help & Advice
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The seven types of effective retargeting

The good folks at Chango just published this nifty graphic. It describes seven different forms of retargeting and where/how each one happens on the web. If you’re looking for new ways to reach customers through banner advertising, you should give this a look:
 

 
Tailor your creative!
Keep in mind that it doesn’t make much sense to use the exact same ads for all the different types of retargeting. Your campaigns will be more effective if you tailor ad creative to what you know about the viewer (e.g., have they been to your website yet or not?).

This can add up to a lot of different banner ads…and a lot of (expensive) hours for a designer. So when you need to build out all those creative executions across all the different types of retargeting, don’t forget to use Canned Banners.

We also published a separate blog post on search retargeting (Chango’s specialty) here.

Questions? Contact us!
 

1 Comment by on June 13, 2011
filed in Ad Networks, Advertising Help & Advice
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Microsoft Advertising launches new small business site


 
Microsoft Advertising has launched a new portal for small business advertisers. It’s mostly focused on search advertising through the self-serve adCenter platform, but it also contains a section called “Beyond Search,” which contains a sub-section on banner (aka “display”) advertising for small businesses.
 

 
While Microsoft Advertising’s display advertising solutions are not self-serve, they are able to reach upwards of 90% of the online audience in the U.S. across a large number of segments. And now that they’re specifically catering to small business advertisers, maybe a self-serve option is on the horizon.

There is also a UK version of the new small business portal. Sadly, it does not seem to offer banner advertising.
 

No Comments by on May 25, 2011
filed in Ad Networks, Advertising Help & Advice
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Which industries and job functions are most likely to respond to display ads?


 
Bizo, a B2B marketing platform that lets advertisers target business professionals, has published a pair of top 10 lists that show which “business audiences” (as categorized by industry and job function) are most likely to take action when they see a banner ad. “Action” could mean whatever it is the banner ad is asking them to do: click, like on Facebook, fill out a form, do jumping jacks, etc.

Here’s the complete press release, and whimsical infographic.

The biggest takeaway seems to be that legal professionals in the legal industry really love banner ads (relative to everyone else). So if you’re advertising legal services to legal professionals, you’d better be running banner ad campaigns…with Bizo’s targeting data, of course.

Without further ado, below are the two lists. The percentages are the “Action Rate Index (ARI)” for each segment. It’s unclear from Bizo’s press release whether a segment with an ARI of 200 is twice as likely to take action as a segment with an ARI of 100.

Top 10 industry segments included:

1. Legal (ARI: 223 percent)
2. Retail (ARI: 192 percent)
3. Software (ARI: 185 percent)
4. Media Publishing(ARI: 184 percent)
5. Wholesalers(ARI: 157 percent)
6. Telecommunications (ARI: 121 percent)
7. Hospitality/Hotels (ARI: 116 percent)
8. Real Estate(ARI: 108 percent)
9. Business Services (ARI: 108 percent)
10. Consumer Services (ARI: 107 percent)

Top 10 job functions included:

1. Legal (ARI: 257 percent)
2. Operations (ARI: 218 percent)
3. Consultants (ARI: 157 percent)
4. Sales (ARI: 156 percent)
5. Marketing (ARI: 147 percent)
6. Finance (ARI: 146 percent)
7. Government (ARI: 102 percent)
8. Education (ARI: 102 percent)
9. Scientists (ARI: 100 percent)
10. Engineering/Technical (ARI: 97 percent)
 

No Comments by on May 25, 2011
filed in Advertising Help & Advice
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Top Reason Users Don’t Click Banner Ads: They Don’t Want to Be Diverted From Their Current Online Activity

It’s a well-documented fact and challenge that average banner ad clickthrough rates are very low, somewhere around 0.09 percent (that’s just 9 clicks out of every 10,000 times an ad is shown).

A recent study sponsored by AdKeeper and 24/7 Real Media surveyed consumers and asked them why they don’t click on banner ads. The number one reason given: 61 percent don’t want to be distracted: “Online banner ads take me away from my current website, or from what I am doing.”

You could look at this research and conclude that people just hate all banner ads, therefore there’s no point in running banner campaigns. But such a conclusion would ignore a few key points:

1. If people don’t want to be distracted from their current web page, then put a lot of relevant content right in your banner ad. That way the viewer doesn’t have to click the ad in order to learn about your products/services. Canned Banners has all sorts of templates that allow you to include lots of product info. Here’s a good example of a template that can feature multiple products and descriptions:


Customize this template »
 
2. A lot of banner ads look downright awful, which probably explains some poor performance. But this study doesn’t seem to have examined that aspect, aside from noting that “43 percent [of consumers] say online banner ads don’t seem interesting or engaging” (the concept “interesting and engaging” could have to do with multiple factors, including targeting, which is quite independent of how an ad looks). It seems to me that the study might have provided deeper insight into consumer behavior by passively observing people in test scenarios, rather than simply asking survey questions, which tend, by their very nature, to lead people to give certain answers. Such observations might reveal how the appearance of a banner ad (regardless of the product/service being advertised) affects its clickthrough rate. However, that probably would have been a much more expensive study to conduct.
 
3. Some banner ads get much higher clickthrough rates than 0.09%. Canned Banners’ own ad campaigns have done better than that. First, it’s important to target your ads intelligently. Understand who your customers are and then find them online by buying inventory on specific types of websites or targeting specific keywords. Don’t just run your banner ads everywhere, because then it’s almost certain that you’ll get low clickthrough rates. Second, utilize tactics like site retargeting, search retargeting, and geo-targeting. These tactics will help you pinpoint your customers; as long as you’re showing them well-designed, relevant banner ads, you’ll probably see clickthrough rates significantly higher than a measly 0.09%.
 

1 Comment by on April 20, 2011
filed in Advertising Help & Advice, Thoughts & Commentary
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Finally, a way to search for companies’ banner ads


 
Ever heard of a startup called Moat? Well, neither had we til the other night. We don’t know how it slipped under our radar.

Moat has analytics software to measure how viewers interact with ads, but they also offer a free service that allows you to search for banner ads by brand name. Great for when you’re looking for inspiration or want to see what your competitors are up to. We just think this is all kinds of neat so we thought we’d share.

I searched for “Samsung” as a test and was treated to 111 Samsung banner ads (both Flash and static) scraped off the web by Moat’s crawlers.
 

 

No Comments by on April 15, 2011
filed in Advertising Help & Advice
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