Advertising with Banners Ads on the Google Display Ads partner site network is not the first thing I would recommend.
From my experience Banner Ads always under-perform in comparison with text ads. It is a huge difference. Often we see double digit CTR in Search. With Google Display Ads a campaign performing above 1% CTR is considered exceptionally good. Best results in advertising with Google are obtained using text ads. Period.
Do you believe in funnels?
Advertiser networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn -and Google of course- are religiously preaching the conversion funnel paradigm. It goes like this;
A consumer, before buying, is first part of a larger group of prospects with certain affinity for your product or service, but not necessarily looking to buy. She is just browsing around on the internet and may not even realize she needs or wants your stuff.
Marketers have invented so called brand awareness campaigns for those people.
Next we have folks looking for similar products. Let’s take the example of the travel industry, where prospects are looking for a holiday but do not know were to go.
When we go down a bit further into the funnel, we focus on searchers for specific countries or types of vacations.
Even further down they might be scrolling all over comparison websites, looking for specific hotels.
When they are finally ready to book, you reel them in with a highly targeted ad.
In short. Display ads are suggested to use to increase brand awareness, to prepare the prospect for their future buyer action.
Let’s just skip all that and go right down to the sale
Honestly. What a load of crap.
I do not care if my clients have ever heard from me or my brand before. I am convinced that when I make the best offer of the right moment, they do not care who I am, they just buy because I’m giving them what they need.
But hey, if you must spend a marketing budget I am glad to help you with that. Even a Display Campaign can be optimized. You might get some direct results out of it too, but do not expect too much.
Visually Triggered Prospects
In case you are convinced you got all you could get out of your Search Campaigns, and you want to get those few extra conversions – from the more visually triggered internet surfers – then, and only then, it might be a good idea to give Display Advertising a try.
