Much has been written and said about effective digital advertising. There are three practical improvements, however, that every agency and client can make today that will positively affect the results of live digital advertising campaigns tomorrow.
1. Size: The bigger the advert, the better the performance on all metrics, from impact to brand awareness and from consideration to interest.
We saw this on Yahoo South Africa with the impact of the full-screen mail login advert and the half-page banners. This monster 1440×1024 advert delivers some of the cheapest per pixel CPMs as it delivers over 300 000 impressions in South Africa a day.
Generally, the half-page banner (300×600) is priced similarly to the rate of the MPU banner (300×250). That gives you an extra 2.4 times exposure at zero times the cost.
2. Design: Design is the easiest way to improve a campaign’s success. It’s a given that the actual advert is three times more important than the media plan.
Designing a full advertising campaign within a small 468×60 sized standard banner is like asking a creative to make a five-second TV commercial. Create big, visually appealing and interactive digital ads. This does not need to break the bank, as you can learn from the performance of the ads each week and optimize their designs weekly. So, after a four-week campaign period the best performance for the campaign would have been achieved. Now that’s simple — and smart.
Sex sells magazines. People sell digital. Include people in your ads. Being glued in front of a computer screen is an unnatural and lonely human behaviour so target market-relevant people and feature them in your ads. This will positively change your campaign outcomes. Ignore this at your peril.
No other medium stimulates all three of the major media senses as does digital: sight, sound and touch. These are the three planes in which to explore your creativity. What are you waiting for? Doesn’t that online banner brief now look more appealing?
3. Position, Position, Position: As any good retailer will tell you, this mantra is as important for virtual traffic and window shoppers.
The keys to this are, first, the media brand, meaning the users’ affinity and trust in the brand (not the planner’s, the client’s or client’s spouse’s trust). Second large reach, limited mainly by budget and by the good ad positions available. But good publishers will have minimums or recommend a hyper-targeted campaigns to achieve decent share of voice percentages that will move the dial. Third, the consumer journey. Be aware of where in the browsing journey the advertising will appear. Interstitial that don’t interrupt or are not lost in oversold sites work the best here, such as login ads. Fourth is the ad impact, an old chestnut that still holds a very valuable influence on ad effectiveness, from print to online. And finally – the obvious – the position of the ad on the page. You pay for what you can see above the fold. A lot of wastage is recorded and paid for each month and being aware of this can increase the effectiveness of your growing digital budgets.
As the unfortunate saying goes, ‘What goes on in digital, stays in digital’. At Apurimac Media we are changing that campaign by campaign and I hope these thee simple steps will help you improve your marketing campaigns. After all, why only restrict them to digital.
Let me know how it goes.
Will Green is CEO of Apurimac Media. Follow him on Twitter @WillJNGreen
