Marketers and clients have a bad taste in their mouths about display advertising haunted by memories of display’s days as a low-click crapshoot. Things are changing and it is time to embrace modern display advertising. Now is the time to turnaround the views and unmask those myths!
Myth No. 1: Display Advertising Doesn’t Work
You know what doesn’t work? Click metrics. Clicks seemed like a novel way to measure display advertising when they first burst onto the scene, but they really had no connection to the way that banner advertising actually works. After all, print ads, TV ads, and billboards have been working for a long time now without anyone actually clicking on them. Want a much more accurate measurement? View-through attribution. View-through attribution – the practice of measuring users who convert a short time after seeing a display ad – just makes more sense. Though view-through attribution lost some credibility when marketers gamed it by setting insanely long conversion windows (like 30 days), we’re seeing that, when measured correctly, view-through makes much more sense than counting clicks.
Myth No. 2: Display Advertising Can Only Be Used for Brand Awareness
Saying that banner advertising can only be used for brand awareness is like saying social media can only be used for contests. Display is much more than a pretty banner that makes people know that a brand exists. Now more performance marketers are using display advertising to drive conversions through precisely targeted ads based on a user’s site and search behavior. There’s a misconception that display is on its way out the door. But quite the contrary, it is growing faster than SEM.
Myth No. 3: Display Advertising Ads Don’t Talk to the Right People
This by far is my favorite myth to debunk. Banner advertising has undergone a dramatic transformation in the past year. Retargeting has emerged as one of the most effective forms of intent-driven advertising that the market has ever seen. With the combination of the advanced precision of programmatic site retargeting and the power of search marketing you are able to find exactly the right people and deliver exactly the right message.
Myth No. 4: Display Advertising is Expensive
Yes… marketers that go directly to sites to buy placements you can easily pay up to $100 CPM or spend $450,000 for a one-day home page take over. This is completely foolish and unnecessary. The vast majority of publishers have a significant amount of remnant inventory, which is made available through auctions on ad exchanges. The average CPM for remnant inventory is between $1 -$2. In some cases banner advertising can often be cheaper and more efficient acquisition channel than SEM.
Myth No. 5: Display Advertising Is Not Exciting
Advancing at a rapid pace display adverting consists of hyper-evolution of ad exchanges, dynamic creative, retargeting pixels, and display inventory making it one of the most complex forms of advertising. That may not be exciting to some people, but, at least for data nerds like me, it can be a lot of fun.
If you don’t believe it, just look at Facebook’s newest development, where users can be retargeted with socially activated ads right in their news feeds, meaning that you can share great content with the right people in the place they’re most likely to see it. And if that doesn’t get you excited, you might be in the wrong business.