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Before getting into digital display advertising, let’s think about one of the most common traditional ways of advertising: billboards. Huge signs that sit high in the sky, delivering your company’s message to the world. Billboards come in a range of sizes and costs.
Some of the factors that are considered while calculating a billboard rental term cost are its location/area, size, and term. But in my opinion, we need to rethink how we view billboards.
Are billboards only to be used in high-traffic cities or next to busy freeways?
Or should we be taking our existing billboards and distributing them online?
If you are a business owner or involved in marketing in some way for your company, I recommend you become very familiar with digital display advertising.
One major network in which display advertising takes place is the Google Display Network also known as GDN.
The Google Display Network is a huge network of news, media, blog, and general publisher websites that have opted into the network to monetize their content.
More simply, they have given up a portion of real estate on their websites to host image ads from advertisers like ourselves.
So hypothetically, say you have a billboard you just invested in.
Do you have a way of tracking your billboard’s results? Can you actually measure its ROI or even see basic metrics as to how many people actually saw your ad?
Digital display advertising comes with all the important metrics we need as marketers and business owners to make educated decisions off the data.
Online display advertising is everywhere such as when you are reading your favorite blog or when you’re about to watch a video on YouTube.
The Power Behind Display Advertising
Plain and simple, running a display ad campaign gives us tons of ammo in the targeting and data departments.
Literally, if I want to target people with my display ad between the ages of 18 to 25 years old that show an interest in basketball, I can do that.
I can show this demographic a specific image ad with a higher chance that they will engage with the ad and learn about our offer.
Display advertising allows us to target specific demographic groups with specific ads, resulting in that magic moment, as you will; When a user is reading content on a specific subject matter and they are shown an ad, specific to that subject matter that they are interested in.
What About Data?
For example, say we are running a display campaign targeting a specific set of demographics and interests. As the display campaign runs, we are able to collect all the data on how the display campaign is performing.
Beginning with simple metrics such as clicks and impressions to conversions and ad performance.
This gives us insight into exactly how our display campaign is performing, if people are engaging, converting, and ultimately if it is having an impact on your business’s bottom line.
On & Offline Billboards – Stimulating Search
What exactly is the purpose of having your billboard? The answer is simple, to spread your message right? That may seem obvious but there is a bit more to it.
Have you ever wondered what happens exactly after someone sees your billboard ad on the road or your “online billboard” on a website?
They have discovered you.
If your ad is good and someone saw your ad and resonated with your message, you have now stimulated interest in them. What do people do when they are interested and need more information?
They search.
They go to Google, or Bing if you are the other 30% of users, and they search for you, whether it be your business, brand, music, you name it. Digital display advertising and billboards stimulate search.
From search, our job as a display advertising agency is to bring the user into our website, show them an unbeatable offer and convert that user into a follower or customer, depending on what stage of the buying process the user is in.
If you’d like to dive deeper into display ads, Google offers a beginner’s course on their channel:
The Takeaway
Overall billboards serve a great purpose and they are not going away anytime soon.
However, we are in a world now in which one way of advertising just isn’t enough. Traditional advertising as a whole isn’t enough.
If you don’t want your business or brand left behind, then it is crucial that you begin incorporating digital online strategies along with your traditional efforts such as billboards and radio, and if you don’t have time for that, get help from an expert display advertising agency.
So now, you can begin to think about your billboards a bit differently and know that not every billboard has to be next to a high traffic intersection.
