Enpiem Internet Marketing Blog

A client asked our advice last week about email newsletter sponsorship and the effectiveness of advertising formats to generate click-traffic. They had the opportunity go with three options either individually or together including banner advertising, text advertising (like Google Adsense) or sponsored editorial content. They didn’t know which was likely to return the best response.

Most people’s gut instinct is to be very wary of banner advertising because many businesses have had their fingers burnt by expecting PPC level CTRs and click-throughs from websites where banner advertising is a real-estate filler. However, you need to divorce yourself from this mindset of traditional display advertising because the email newsletter audience is already far more targeted than general website traffic. This particular newsletter was a specialist bulletin that was an opt-in publication to members of an content-rich website. With a significant volume of recipients, the publication looked like a good fit for our client. But what type of advertising should they opt for was the question – banner, text or advertorial?

Unlike many online marketing initiatives, there is surprisingly little information, case-studies or advice on this subject. This is probably because of the individual nature of email newsletters and the composition of their audience profiles. We have worked with clients that send lengthy content-rich newsletters that recipients will print to read whilst commuting, whilst other publications offer 1-line teasers of website-based content that draws the recipient back to the website and further information and associated products/services.

A study carried out by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants found that sponsored content such as case studies or white papers received more reader attention than banner adverts. Having analysed the time readers spent on specific sections of a content-rich email, they found that sponsored editorial content received around 90% of the time that the reader spent on content from the regular authors. They also found that results could be significantly improved when combinations of brand exposure were used such as sponsored editorial content plus graphical advertising or text advertising in the same newsletter. Whilst they acknowledged that using banner and text advertising together was more effective than a single ad channel alone, response rates were eight times higher when graphical/text adverts were used in conjunction with sponsored editorial content. The study’s author Hank Berkowitz said “If you don’t have the sponsored content to reinforce the message in your ads, they are less likely to remember who provided the information.”

Another study carried out using the email publication Hedge Fund Daily looked at the response levels of text and banner advertising formats when driving recipients to download a white paper. Despite an initial hypothesis that the visually appealing graphical banner would be more effective, they actually found that the text ad outperformed the banner ad by a ratio of more than 2:1. They believed that this was due to effective integration of text advertising alongside regular editorial content and the reader’s tendency to ‘tune-out’ graphical advertising. But they did add a caveat that this would be something that should be tested on each publication due to the nature of the audience profile.

We would agree with this note of caution when advising anybody of the choice of ad formats. There is no golden rule for which format to use. The best option would be to run split-tests to determine the effectiveness of each format or combination of formats. However, this might not be possible so a sequence of tests could be carried out to the entire user-base on successive broadcasts using various combinations of advertising.

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full display advertising service from creative development to placement and reporting as well as a full email marketing service for both sales broadcasts and newsletter communications. Contact us to discuss your display advertising requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.

The death of banner advertising has been a long touted rumour, but we still see significant proportions of online advertising revenue devoted to graphical advertising every year. Whilst there are still large brands with saturation-coverage sized budgets (the mobile phone networks spring to mind), many smaller companies have simply gotten smarter in their selection and use of banner advertising.

Creating a display advertising campaign calls upon the same planning stages that we would use with any digital marketing activity (in our case SOSTAC). You need to have an awareness of your market, the competitors and the behaviour or your target audience – situation analysis provides this information. Setting clear objectives for the campaign will allow you to gauge success or failure. Your strategy will be to place graphical media in the most appropriate locations for your budget to attract the attention of your target audience for either brand awareness or enticement to visit your website (or both). The tactics of display advertising include the use of various formats and technologies as well booking of placements. Action is the steps necessary to implement the tactical decisions you made such as placement booking, media production. The control phase assesses the performance metrics from the campaign against the set objectives to determine success or failure of the activity. We are interested here in the tactical element of the campaign plan and the mechanics of the channel.

There are many commonly seen display advertising sizes, with the long-standing traditional size being 468×60 pixels. Other common sizes include: 120×60 button,120×600 skyscraper,728×90 leaderboard and 300×250 MPU. Often media owners will set file size limits as serving banners adds to the total size of their web page. For example this could be 12-18k. Output format is commonly JPEG or static/animated GIF. An animated GIF comprises of several static frames that are linked together to form an animation sequence of images or messages. Rich media banners are now commonplace with video and audio being embedded to enhance the visual appearance of the banner creative. The file size is usually significantly larger than standard GIF banners and can feature interactive elements such as data capture and pre-population of forms once the banner call-to-action has been made.

When setting the objectives of your display advertising campaign, you will need to decide what constitutes success or failure. Some of the key metrics to assess when setting your objectives include:

• > Impressions – the number of times the ad has been served (called up when a page is viewed). Whilst this is not an accurate measurement of the number of individual visitors to be exposed to the creative, it is an accurate assessment of the number of times the advert has been viewed. If your campaign objective is to have the banner seen 1-million times then serving the banner with 1-million impressions will meet your objectives
• > Click-throughs – the number of times your display advert is clicked on, resulting in a visit to your website
• > Click-through rate – by taking the total number of banner impressions served and dividing this by the number of clicks received gives you the click-throug-rate (CTR) of the campaign. Display advertising click throughs will often fall significantly lower than other channels such as paid-search advertising unless you are buying on a CPC basis
• > Cost-per-click – taking the total cost of your advertising placement, you can divide this by the total number of click-throughs received to get a cost-per-click figure
• > Cost-per-sale – the amount of advertising spend necessary to result in a product purchase. For example if you spend £500 on a banner placement and receive 20 sales as a result of this advertising then your CPS is £25

Many advertisers take all of these factors into account when running a display advertising campaign. When you are running multiple placements it is necessary to judge each independently so you can better target future campaigns.

Placing display advertising can be done in several ways. You can pay a target site directly to show your banner. The cost will depend on the billing model they are using such as CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (cost-per-click) or fixed period price such as per-month charge irrespective of impressions/clicks. Another option is to use an advertising network who manage a broad portfolio of publisher sites to display the creative. Is your primary objective brand exposure so you are looking for a high traffic website with large audience that need to be introduced or reminded of your brand? Or are you more interested in accessing a particular niche and therefore don’t necessarily need a high-traffic site, but one with a pre-qualified target audience likely to be interested in your product.

Should you use an advertising agency? Obviously you will need to pay for such a service, which will eat into your advertising budget, but using an agency has several benefits. For example, an agency will buy advertising space in bulk and therefore qualify for lower CPM rates. The agency might have experience of advertising in your market sector and therefore know successful and not so successful sites to recommend or avoid when making your placement selection. They will often have creative development capabilities to manage the copywriting and artwork production of your campaign banners and therefore know the mechanical specifications of the publisher sites that artwork will need to conform to (banner sizes and file sizes). However, agencies will often have minimum spend requirements for campaign involvement and if you are a small company with a limited advertising budget then the agency might not be willing to accept you as a client or their management charges may be prohibitively expensive.

Banner advertising networks are an alternative to the agency route, providing access to a large number of publisher sites, handling the placement for you. They usually determine where your adverts will be displayed although you might not always agree with these choices. You certainly won’t get the level of client attention that an advertising agency will be able to give you. But compared to the cost of using an agency, this is often an acceptable shortcoming as it provides cost-effective placement. Some networks specialise in discounted placement by selling excess banner inventory that publishers have been unable to sell themselves.

As with formats such as billboards or television advertising, you have a matter of seconds to communicate your message. Expecting visitors to wait for the completion of a 15-frame animated GIF to explain a message is unlikely to work. You need to grab the visitors attention and convey your message clearly and quickly. Don’t try and overwhelm the visitor by trying to convey multiple messages - keep things simple. You should also carefully consider the use of rich media – will it really aid the campaign?

Enpiem Internet Marketing offers a full display advertising service from creative development to placement and reporting. Contact us to discuss your display advertising requirements and how we can help your business succeed online.