Understand Who Your Audience Is

The first rule of any advertising campaign is to know who you're creating the ad for. Audience insights let you focus on delivering the right message to your people.

Getting this right sets the stage for the rest of the campaign to succeed. And this is pretty much the same for display ads as well.

Tips To Finding Your People

Getting the right people in front of your ads is as important as the ad itself. Ensuring you reach your audience guarantees you the best chance of success.

When you have the right people looking at your ads, you improve engagement and conversions. It is not just about the message but also about how you deliver it.

• Google Analytics is one of the most used platforms for audience insights. For example, it shows what age and gender users are interested in your product/service.

• Every social media platform today has its own insights module. Facebook Audience Insights is a great example.

• Develop an accurate buyer persona to explore other possibilities further.

Clarity About What You're Offering

When you're competing against other brands in the market, the clarity of your message is critical. It has to do with the message you are sending to your audience.

You need to work on your positioning and what kind of clientele you want to attract. And to be successful, you need to ensure that you're being clear about what you're trying to say.

Strategies For Improving Brand Message

The first step to knowing the brand message is understanding the product and what you're trying to pitch. Have a clear message in your mind that you can translate into words.

Research your product or service and ensure you cover all angles. Finally, ensure that your messages align with your product and brand image.

• Effective brand messaging is based on pillars of supporting benefits.

• The objective is to explain why someone should choose your brand.

• For success, position your brand among your competitors. Give your audience a clear reason why they should choose you.

Ensure That Content Is Brand-Aligned

When you are a business owner in a competitive space, everything you do needs to align with your brand. It gives your audience a consistent view that your marketing flows in the same direction as your brand. People are more interested in brands with their own set of consistent values and direction.

Tips To Keep Content Aligned To Brand

Content is the most important part of any marketing strategy. It is what people see about your brand. Content is what gets people to click on your display ad.

To encourage people to do so, you need to keep content close to your brand values. Your brand messaging should work with the brand outlook.

• The first thing you should do is create a solid content strategy. You can do this with general platforms like SEMrush.

• Hotjar is another tool to help you understand how audiences view your content. The below screenshot shows that it allows seeing video recordings of how users engage with the content on site.

• ContentCal can help you schedule your content pieces.

Offer A Distinct Value Proposition

When you are competing with other brands, it helps to understand what you can offer. To do well, you need to offer something that your competitors cannot.

Alternatively, you could do this at a price point they cannot match. This is your brand's value proposition. You need to communicate this to your audience as clearly as you can.

Elevating Your Brand's Strengths

The simple route to success with display ads is to offer your clients what they're looking for. You need to have a sense of clarity in how you communicate this. Your brand's value proposition needs to be emphasized and displayed. It is how your audience can differentiate you from your competitors.

• Be clear and transparent on your display ad when communicating with your audience.

• Focus on the value proposition of your brand. Get the message out to your users.

• Your language should be simple and effective in your display ad.

Test Multiple Content Formats

Talking about display ads, no single formula works for everything.

As a business owner, you need to test and find out what appeals to your user base. It should offer them a good mix of value and information about your product. You should also pitch your services easily for them to understand.

Importance Of A/B Testing

If you want to explore all possibilities of your ads, ensure that you test your display ads.

Creating testing scenarios means you know what the audience response will be. It also opens up different possibilities that you can use for your final ad. You can experiment with several things, including font, image placement, content, etc.

• Bannerflow is a tool that allows marketers to test their display ads. You can tweak several things to get the right results. The screenshot below shows how it offers to add the CTAs and track their insights.

• Another tool that has been getting good reviews is StackAdapt. You can do this with multiple mediums.

• AdRoll can also help improve your testing process. It is an all-inclusive eCommerce platform as well.

Create A Strong CTA

A CTA can often be the difference between doing well and a bad ad.

A call to action is a powerful part of the marketing process. It entices people to click your ads or engage with your content. With a strong CTA, you differentiate yourself from your competitors. It will get you better traction with people in your niche.

Tips To Create A Powerful CTA

While imagery and layouts are critical to a display ad, the thing that gets people clicking is the CTA. Ensure that you use powerful verbs to direct people to interact with your ad. Below screenshot shows such an ad with “Learn More” as CTA.



This is also where you can test different CTAs for ads.

• If you're looking for the best CTAs, your competitors are a great place to start.

• To help you narrow down CTAs, you can use tools like Wishpond. It also includes testing modules.

• You can also get some inspiration from the ClickMinded website. More specifically, Da Button Factory is what you need.

Use Simple But Effective Design

Studies on marketing have shown that people respond better to simple designs. Avoid confusing your audience with over-the-top imagery and animation.

Keeping it simple and subtle can have great benefits for your display ad. It can tell your audience exactly what the brand message is and what you want them to do. The below screenshot shows the simple product design with an offer and CTA to purchase.

Focusing On Minimalist Design

The key to the design language for display ads is to keep it simple enough to be understood by people. People don't have a lot of time to spend browsing online. It pushes brands to improve their ability to get the message across in a smaller time window.

• Check through different display ad templates available online. It can inspire you to build your own.

• WordStream has a powerful Display Ad Builder that can help you with design.

• SEMrush includes an ad design module that you can use to improve your display ad.

Get The Right Typography

Typography or font choices are incredibly important to ad copy. Brands cannot just choose one font arbitrarily when it comes to marketing.

There are several things that you need to look at before you decide. The font has to be representative of your brand and goals. You should also consider the size of different elements for the ad.

Choosing The Best Font

Like the design, it's best to keep fonts simple. It's better to follow a few basic ground rules to get the best font for your copy. Choose fonts that are legible on different sizes of displays. If possible, avoid cursive fonts because they can look bad when they're too small.

Take a look at the below screenshot, which has easily readable and not so disturbing fonts.

• Don't overdo font choices with too many of them in one ad. It can be distracting and lead to bad responses.

• When using different fonts, ensure that you capitalize appropriately. This can affect the look and feel of different fonts.

• Opt for monospace fonts when working on ad copy. It is more consistent with spacing.

Curate The Images You Use

The images that you use tell people a lot about your brand. Ensure that you curate new images for your display ads each time.

People can find out the difference between new and old images. It helps to keep your ads new and fresh. Keep the theme of your images consistent with your brand. For instance, life science and microscope are interrelated, making the below display ad relevant.

Tips To Improve Visual Impact

Your choice of an image should take into many considerations, including product and brand. You should also understand which platform you're displaying images on. It could be different based on mobile, web, or search results.

• Only use high-resolution images for your ads. Low-resolution images can get further downgraded on some platforms.

• Tailor your image size to the size of your display ad.

• Tools like Adobe Photoshop can help improve image quality and compose different images.

Encourage User Urgency

The key to improved business depends on the number of people who buy into your service. And the best way to get them to take action is through urgency. You can introduce time-limited offers and competitions that can encourage users.

The below screenshot shows discount offers on the product, which may not last forever. Thus the audience most likely converts from it.



Using different voucher codes is another way to improve sales.

Pushing Users To Take Action

An urgent headline to your ad encourages users to take action from your ad. Incentivize people clicking on your ad. It can easily spread through word of mouth, making it effective to market your services. A good headline can also improve engagement amongst your audience.

• The best way to create urgency is through scarcity. You can either limit your products or time.

• Test with different headlines on various demographics to find the best one.

• Remember to add relevant incentives to your services and the audience.

Experiment With Animated Images

Dynamic image formats have their charm with people. They are naturally attracted to animation and creative images. To draw them in, you have to get the animation done tastefully. The below screenshot shows a software tool using it efficiently to market their product.



Don't include animation just for the sake of it. Also, don't go overboard with animation, as that can overwhelm your audience and keep them from clicking the ad.

Strategies For Animating Ads

The key part of animating display ads is to be subtle but impactful. Don't use too many transitions or animated elements in your ad. That can put off users and cause the ad to have the opposite effect.

Rather, use tasteful animation loops and sequences. Ensure that it doesn't take too long to load on a website. Worst case scenario - the user might not even see it.

• Ensure that the animation happens in complete loops.

• Adobe Animate is a great tool to help your animation process.

• DP Animation Maker is an alternative to more expensive tools. It has all the features of more expensive packages.

Personalize Your Display Ads

This is perhaps one of the most critical parts of the marketing scenario. Personalization is what can win you clients in a competitive marketplace.

People interact more with brands that can sell them what they want. It has to match their expectations to get them to click perfectly. It is why you should focus on customizing your display ads.

Tips To Customize Ads

Let's step into the shoes of an average user experiencing ads. If you were that person, you too would tire of seeing the same ad for shoes every time.

Customization is a method that switches things up for the users. It can ensure that ads cater more accurately to different demographics in your audience.

• Create buyer personas and work to design with them in mind. A good tool to use is Make My Persona from HubSpot. The below screenshot shows a template of a buyer persona.

• Create compelling imagery and content to back up your customization.

• Canva is a great tool for creating small graphics for your ads. You can choose a custom resolution for your ads.

Ignoring Ad Optimization For Campaigns

Display advertising campaigns are becoming more popular than traditional display advertising. Many companies and advertisers are trying to figure out how to use display advertising effectively.

One of the biggest problems with display ads is that some people ignore ad optimizations. This can cause problems with the performance and delivery of the ad.

Below screenshot is the dashboard of Google ads performance. It lets you analyze the metrics and optimize ads to achieve the desired results.

Understanding Benefits Of Ad Optimization

Ad optimization ensures that you check all the boxes for your display ads.

These are established conventions that can guide you to better display ads. It might not be the gospel, but they help when you want better results from your display ads in a short time.

• During optimization, ensure that you get your tools and information from a reputed source.

• The best place to read up on how you can optimize display ads is from Google. The information is current and relevant.

• For a powerful ad campaign optimization platform, check out Acquisio. It is powered by AI and offers comprehensive options.

Limiting Your Target Reach

To get the most out of your display ads, always ensure that you have as much reach as possible. Your ad campaign needs to get to as many people as possible.

There is no time to be conservative about your targeting reach. If you want to succeed, you need to set your targeting a bit more expansively.

Improving Ad Targeting

Being hands-on with your ad targeting can yield positive results. But you should thoroughly read about it before you check under the hood of your marketing campaign.

Ensure that you are comfortable with different parts of your marketing platform. You can also use tools that can help you with this process.

• By default, most ad targeting is set conservatively for your campaign.

• Opting for manual targeting can improve display ad campaign performance. But you should know what you're doing.

• Tools like RecommendMe can help you perfect your ad targeting to get the most out of your campaign. The below screenshot shows how it offers effective recommendations that can be included in the ads.

Trying To Attract Everyone To Your Brand

As a brand, you have your specific demographics to cater to. These form the core of your success.

They are likely to have certain preferences and expectations. But one of the mistakes businesses commit is trying to appeal to everyone in the market. This can only lead to a loss in the existing business. People might also become disenfranchised with your brand.

Focus On One Niche Of Customers

Getting the right audience for your brand is as important as displaying ads themselves. Your focus as a business owner should be on the specific demographics of the audience. If you look at too many different people, you might end up with none.

Focusing on a particular group will ensure that your campaign is compelling to people. For example, in the below image ad for an earphone brand is displayed on a page related to a movie.

• Come up with strong representatives of your buyer persona. This will guide you to getting the right demographic for your business.

• To get the right buyer persona for your business, opt for tools like Akoonu.

• You can also use a simpler platform like Xtensio to build a specific demographic.

Using Remarketing During Ad Reach

Remarketing is like its namesake showing an ad to an existing viewer about other services a company offers.

Remarketing works for business because the person experiencing it already knows about the company and its products. The below screenshot shows an ad displayed on social media timeline after browsing that website to buy clothes.



But when they have no idea and are new to the brand, they do not click on remarketing ads.

Using Remarketing Ads Correctly

As a rule of thumb, people new to your marketing funnel should not experience remarketing ads. It can confuse them, and they will not click on the ad.

The key is to separate people in your funnel and people who aren't effective. This can put them in the middle of the marketing journey.

• Ensure that you manage advertising cookies effectively. It can help identify the right people.

• Implement effective tracking systems that can help you differentiate one user from another.

• Realign your analytics with your existing marketing pipeline for better results.

Adding Too Many Negative Keywords

In the world of marketing, there exist negative keywords and phrases as well. These are keywords that you use to exclude your ads for specific topics.

You shouldn't use too many negative keywords for display ads. It can negatively impact your website rankings when you use too many of them in your content.

Reducing Negative Keywords

You can use negative keywords to exclude certain results from triggering your website. An example is when you exclude the keyword "shoes" from your ad campaign.

The ad triggers when a user searches for "striped shoe" but not "striped shoes." Sometimes, it never triggers a display ad from your business when this happens. The screenshot below shows how using negative keywords results in SERPs.

• Negative keywords can lower your ad costs and improve conversions.

• Use negative keywords sparingly and only when necessary.

• It is important to regularly audit your negative keyword use to prevent flat spots in your ads.

Tracking Only Direct Conversions

Something difficult to keep track of with marketing campaigns is conversions. It can be difficult to trace where you made the conversion if you do not have a proper framework.

Businesses need to watch out for only tracking direct conversions without considering other avenues.

Considering All Methods Of Conversions

It is important to account for all types of conversions during your ad campaign.

Ensure that you check other aspects like Store visits, cross-device conversions, and view-through conversions. These metrics together can give you a good idea of how you can improve the accuracy of conversions.

• Without tracking other forms of conversions, you won't have an accurate picture of your ad performance.

• Google Analytics is the simplest and most effective way to track your conversions. The below screenshot shows a snippet of display ad insights.

• KissMetrics is another platform that can help track your conversions.

Spamming The Same Ads

One common mistake with Display Advertising is Spamming.

Displaying the same ads repeatedly. Display Advertising is an effective way to reach your target audience. However, if you spam your ads, you will annoy your customers.

Spamming is a guaranteed way to lose customers to your competitors. The below image shows that a firm is running Christmas ads in June, suggesting that it was their old offer.

Coming Up With Fresh Content

To keep your ads from getting stale, ensure that you switch up your content. You can do this within a specific period, consistently. It can create excitement within your community and increase interest in your products.

• Using the same ads over and over again can cause audience overlap. This can impact your ROI.

• Being innovative with your images and text can create a better outlook for your brand.

• Keep track of completed ads for your products. Build better ads based on them or use completely new templates.

Skipping A/B Testing For Ads

Testing has been a critical phase of advertising for many years now. It is difficult to get the right display ad out for your brand without testing it extensively.

Thorough testing improves your chances of creating ads that matter to your audience. You can choose which ad formats work well with your products and tweak them as required.

The below screenshot shows the same ad displayed differently. The one attracting more audience and engagement can be used for prolonged advertising.

Benefits Of Testing

A/B testing is the simplest way to ensure that your audience will like your ad. It avoids needless spending and tightens your branding. And above all, it's simple to implement and effective at getting results.

• AB testing can be challenging for businesses. Using tools can considerably cut down the time required for effective testing.

• Crazy Egg offers good testing tools to improve your display ad results.

• Check out Freshmarketer for their comprehensive testing tools.

Bannerwise

Pricing

About

Bannerwise is a creative suite of management tools to help advertisers and brands. It aims to scale your advertising potential to fit many projects and clients. It has everything a team needs to create full-fledged ad campaigns. From testing to custom creatives to testing - everything is included.

Features

• Cross-platform: It works on every device and platform, including mobile devices and laptops. It gives you flexibility.

• Authoring Tools: The focus of this tool is on creativity. It helps you get the most out of your ad campaign through efficient tools and modules.

• Customized Ads: Create customized ads that are compelling to your audiences. HTML5 banner ads are great for attracting attention.

Criteo

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About

If you're looking to revamp your remarketing process, then Criteo is your go-to app platform. It is backed by powerful AI modules that can help your brand reach the right customers.

It has a wealth of data and information from more than 500 million users and four billion products. It has support in over 25 different countries as well.

Features

• Expansive And Unique Dataset: This platform boasts a huge set of actionable data for your brand. You can build the perfect retargeting ad cycle with this.

• First Party Media Network: This considerably improves privacy for the users. It lets you connect with other people on the network and share ideas.

• Predictive Bidding: This can help you optimize marketing spending for your brand. Build a stronger and better ad platform without the high cost.

Roku OneView

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About

Formerly known as Dataxu, the Roku OneView platform helps businesses reach out to people using streaming TV.

This is a particularly huge market as most of the world today uses some form of OTT for their entertainment. Users can manage all their TV ads from one place with this platform.

Features

• OTT Platform: It focuses on offering marketing solutions for OTT, including linear TV and omnichannel. You can optimize your spending based on several criteria.

• Business Intelligence: The intelligence tab helps you learn more about your audience. It can assist you when coming up with unique targets for your campaign.

• Analytics: Comes with detailed analytics that can tell you everything about a campaign. It is easy to navigate and get information from.

WhatRunsWhere

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About

WhatRunsWhere is one of the most comprehensive business ad intelligence platforms available.

You see what works well for other brands in your niche with just a click. You can use this information to improve your marketing funnel. It gives you a lot of data with marketing, and it enables you to build your marketing funnel quickly.

Features

• Updated Data: It has all the updated information about marketing that you need. You can uncover winning strategies with this platform.

• Ad Intelligence: Get accurate information and analytics of what your competitor has been running. You can then improve it.

• Data Reliability: WRW provides consistent and reliable information about competitors in your niche. Information obtained with this platform is more accurate than other platforms that cost a lot more.

Google Ad Manager

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Formerly called DoubleClick For Publishers, Google Ad Manager is one of the biggest players in the market. It is an all-inclusive ad revenue engine that you can use to get information across various sources and channels.

It improves profitability by lowering costs and increasing sales. You can also manage all your ad campaigns in one place.

Features

• Seamlessness: You can switch to multiple platforms and programs for your marketing process. It has a huge range of metrics to get a more accurate picture of your different campaigns.

• Timely Updates: Google provides updates to the platform periodically. This ensures that you get the best version of the platform.

• Detailed Analytics: Delivers a lot of usable information about your ad campaigns.

AdRoll

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About

Pitching itself as a growth platform, AdRoll combines display, social, and email marketing into one seamless platform. It offers powerful automation features and the space to include several clients and projects. You also get a platform that is open to easy collaboration with your team.

Features

• Easy Setup: The platform is easy to set up for your business for something this powerful. It also has an intuitive and easy interface to work with, even for new users.

• Dynamic Display Banners: AdRoll can deliver great-looking display banners for your business. This can be helpful for teams who don't have professional designers.

• Comprehensive Testing: AdRoll has testing tools to facilitate every sort of ad testing. A/B testing is critical to the success of a marketing campaign.

Xandr

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About

One of the most comprehensive Demand Side Platform (DSP) tools, Xandr has been a revelation to businesses. With this platform, you get more control over your marketing collateral. It can give you the required information to improve your purchase decision.

Features

• AI Optimization: It uses artificial intelligence to improve decision-making during bidding. This results in effective buying for your brand.

• Custom Integrations: Since Xandr is programmable, you can include many integrations. These integrations can make it a more flexible platform.

• Controlled Bidding: The user has full control over the bidding process. You can choose custom buying models that help determine the right choice of ads.