The general public consensus about banner ads is that they are blooming annoying. But if you work in the online marketing area, you’ll know that there are a lot of exciting things happening in the banner space. I agree, if you just bang out a banner campaign with limited thought or targeting you are going to annoy people. But why would you when there are so many options available? These days you can get fairly sophisticated in how you reach and target your potential customers.
Contextual advertising means you serve your banners in an environment which is suitable for what you are advertising. So if you are advertising a hotel in brighton you would should place your banner next to some editorial about Brighton, ideally editorial about tourist information, like a trip advisor Brighton hotel review or a timeout guide to Brighton.
Behavioural advertising is when you target the user based on past behaviour, so if they have recently looked at a Brighton tourist or Brighton hotel website you might be able to serve them a banner when they are checking their email on MSN or Google.
A very popular form of behavioural advertising is retargeting, where you use cookie information to retarget web users who have actually been to your own site before. Unfortunately you need a significant amount of traffic to your website to be able to do this but once you are at this stage its an essential tool to use. You can even identify people who have left your site at a crucial stage in the booking process and then get in back in touch with a ‘sales clincher’ message to get them back before they book elsewhere.
On top of these new targeting routes you can also get quite sophisticated about the message in your creative. Using dynamic creatives, hotel companies for example, can now change the advertising message based on the context of where the ad is being shown or based on user behaviour. So a company with hotels all over the UK can change their message based on whether a user is looking at or has looked at hotels in Bognor or Bournemouth at that particular time. And if you are retargeting a user who has visited your website you can show them a banner with an image of the hotel they were actually looking at on your site and maybe even with a special offer to get the sale. Other new developments via dynamic creative involve retargeting users with banners which use the text they used in google to first find your website (i.e. short break Paris). Another creative route getting ADMAN very excited is the ability to showcase almost your whole website content in a banner. So that people can find and choose a hotel within the banner and then click through to book. For some companies you can even book within the banner.
Not surprisingly users find these banners more useful and more relevant and so they are more likely to click on the banner. So don’t give up the banner campaign just yet. Just maybe having a think about what new technologies might be able to work for you and your business.
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