Auto-play video and banner ads are seen to be least effective digital formats by global CMOs
What digital ad formats should you use to get the best ROI online? One way to answer the question is to flip it on its head, and ask, what are the least effective formats?
According to a survey of global CMOs, the worst ad formats are auto-play videos and standard banners. Standard banners are hardly surprising, as ad blockers and 'banner blindness' have taken their toll of the years. It's gotten so bad that on many sites the majority of banner ad clicks are actually accidental.
It's interesting that no CMOs thought that sponsored content was an ineffective technique, and very few thought pre-roll ads were ineffective. This shows that it isn't video ads that are ineffective, just video ads starting when the user hasn't opted in to watch anything.
…
How to make crucial decisions regarding your retargeting budget.
Decisions, decisions, decisions; it can be difficult making the right choice when considering how to spend your remarketing budget with Facebook or Google. Where most PPC managers go wrong is the actual decision-making process. It is crucial understand what you should consider before making a decision.
[si_guide_block id="87521" title="Access Member Quick Win: How to do Facebook retargeting right" description="Learn when and how to use Facebook's different retargeting options with Gareth Roberts."]
1. Consider your message - carefully crafted second chances
The whole idea of remarketing is to give advertisers a second chance to hook someone who has visited their site, but not bought anything, there may be a number of reasons for this:
The website is bland, clunky, dated, not functional - let's not get sidetracked into the importance of functional and appealing landing pages, but it is important to…
Chart of the day: Digital Ad Spend grows at fastest rate in 9 years
Recommended link: Latest UK online advertising spend research - IAB
In April each year the IAB and PwC publish their regular survey giving full-year figures for online advertising in the previous year.
We recommend using this annual research on online advertising to benchmark your investment in online media with other organisations in the UK at a top level.
The main headline from this years analysis which should prompt review of which channels are being used to engage audiences is about mobile.
Driven by advertisers’ need to tap into people’s rising use of mobile to watch content, digital advertising grew at its fastest rate for nine years – by 17.3% to £10.3 billion in 2016 – according to the Internet Advertising Bureau UK / PwC Digital Adspend report. The last time annual growth was higher…
Chart of the day: Research by Advertising Association and Warc finds that digital dominates UK advertising spend
Magazine advertising continued to decrease, whilst digital magazine advertising is expected to grow. Regional newspapers and Direct Mail see the biggest decreases, whilst digital formats are expected to continue their recent growht.
Some key highlights of the research include:
Ad spend in the UK grew to £5.8bn, representing 3.9% rise year-on-year
Overall for 2016 UK ad spend grew 3.7%, reaching a total of £21.4bn, this is also the seventh year of continued growth
Digital ad spend is up 13.4% to £10.3bn for 2016. 45.4% to £3.9bn. The report predicts mobile advertising spend will slow over the coming years (2017: +30.4% and 2018: +20.8%) as the current boom dies down.
Mobile accounted for 45.4% of that digital ad spend, meaning £3.9bn spent, however, the report predicts that mobile advertising…
How to use Artificial Intelligence to boost ROI from advertising
For marketers, the tide of artificial intelligence has finally crashed ashore.
It has begun making waves at industry events like WSDM: The 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining Web Search and Data Mining conference in San Francisco. In his keynote address, Google research fellow Jeff Dean told attendees it’s time to embrace techniques like deep learning. Once a land of buzzwords, rapid improvements in machine learning have made AI a pivotal member of marketer’s toolkits. As best practice guidelines on Machine Learning at Google shared by Martin Zinkevich (technical) show, Google are actively using Machine Learning in many projects.
Dean and others are excited about AI because it will finally allow marketers to take full advantage of the hordes of data they’ve begun collecting. While we’ve been able to generate mind-boggling mounds of data for a while —…
JP Morgan Chase found it was advertising on 388,000 sites to no effect. Brands using programmatic advertising need to sit up and take notice.
Over the past several years we've seen programmatic ad spend saw, Icarus-like, to dizzying heights. At the start of this year, UK programmatic spend was predicted to increase by over 30% in 2017, whilst US programmatic ad spend has tripled since 2014, becoming the single fastest growing ad medium. So-called gurus predicted this trend would continue, by doing what so-called gurus always do and assuming the future will resemble an extrapolated version of the past. Hence the predictions that programmatic spend will double by 2020, reaching an incredible $42 billion dollars globally. But the present has got in the way.
Ever since The Times uncovered programmatic ads for major brands appearing on the websites of far-right hate groups or terrorists (See Mercedes Advert on an IS video below), brands have…
Chart of the day: Advertisers that implemented Influencer Marketing in 2016 received $11.69 in Earned Media Value (EMV) on average for every $1.00 they spent.
A report by RhythmOne highlights the influencer marketing benchmarks for full-year 2016, finding that influencer marketing is providing high Earned Media Value (EMV).
Earned Media Value is the value of earned media (such as influencers promoting a brand). It is the value given to the impact of the influencer campaigns and is organic, compared to paid media (such as pay per click) or owned media (advertising on your own channels e.g. your own website).
Food and software industries ran the most influencer campaigns whilst health and pharma had the largest average EMV, followed by retail, food and grocers.
With an average of $11.69 influencer marketing is a successful marketing approach, engagement rates average at around 2% according to the report (which is total…
Chart of the day: Just over half (56%) of European ads reached their desired age group of 25 to 54.
Nielsen investigated how many ads have reached their desired audience finding that ads aren't always reaching the desired audience. Yesterday we reported on the US figures, and today we are covering the results for Ads in Europe (UK, France, Germany, Italy).
In a world where targeting is everything, it doesn't mean ads are getting in front of the right customers every time.
Data: June 2016. Mobile insights are provided for directional purposes only.
Key findings from the Nilsen study and the chart indicated above include:
56% of ads were correctly served to 25-54 year olds and amongst those 40% were accurately shown to males compared to 34% for females.
27% of ads were accurately displayed to 25-34 year olds.
When it comes to industry 57% are…
A brand-building case study focusing on format length, branding and testing best practices
YouTube is becoming an increasingly important tool for digital marketers, both from an owned and paid media perspective. Over the last five years the platform has continued to grow and with over a billion users and many millions of views a day, Google can genuinely claim to have both the first and second largest search engines on the planet and a media platform to rival many mainstream broadcasting rivals.
From an advertising perspective, the reach YouTube offers marketers is phenomenal, however as with all forms of advertising, optimising the media alone will only get you so far. I’ve recently been involved in a multichannel equity campaign and due to the storytelling nature of the content we’ve had to really think about how best to recut the main TVC for the YouTube TrueView campaign (which is using skippable pre-roll ads).
The…
How to avoid the common mistakes of programmatic advertising
Access to digital display ad inventory is becoming commoditized. It used to be that marketers and brands worked with publishers independently, leading to “handshake deals” that often left smaller players out in the cold.
Thanks to online trade desks and programmatic ads, this is changing. Most trade desks and platforms cooperate, and with the democratization of ad inventory, marketers and competitors operate on a relatively equal playing field.
It’s great that the playing field is equal, but that doesn’t mean marketers can mix a martini and call it a day just yet. The failure or success of your campaigns is ultimately up to you, and there are plenty of obstacles to pay attention to. And as with most things in life, you as a marketer need to play an active role in your media buying to guarantee you’re getting the best results.
The Hangover
Traditional trading…
