Best Practices for Effective Advertising
Here are the best practices we're seeing right now in online advertising:
Test, Test, Test
Did we say test? Running a smaller buy as a test is an effective method to determine what placement, creative, SOV "share of voice," etc. will be best for a larger advertising campaign.
Insider Tip
Intermarkets sales professionals will help you engineer a test campaign that will give you a good indication of how a full campaign will perform, without the cost of a full-blown campaign roll-out. Sometimes our sales professionals can tell you a good joke or two, too.
Ad Design
It's always easier to critique than to create, but here's what's working, right now:
- The simpler, the better: Keep your ad simple because you have less than three seconds (or even less time!) to grab a website visitor's attention. Use that time wisely by clearly communicating a key idea, in an uncluttered, and easy-to-understand format.
- Fresh bananas sell better than old stinky ones: Keeping your ad creative fresh is critical for longer campaigns because website visitors who see the same ad over and over and over again eventually become "blind" to the ad. Hellooo? Anybody home? Continuously monitor your campaign and adjust it as performance warrants.
- Go with the flow: Editorial designs work well with units below the scroll. The vision thing: Large ad units are excellent platforms for rich media, video and animation.
Insider Tip
Combine management of your campaign's duration with managing your ad creatives to maximize overall performance. Don't tell them we told you, but our sales professionals really do like talking to clients and helping you with your ad campaign needs. Let's keep that between us, okay?
Ad Serving
Our ad serving technology features all the bells and whistles: Frequency caps, day-part serving (time of day targeting), geo-targeting and roadblocks (sponsorships) should be strategically managed to maximize performance. We'll work with you on the details to make sure that you're utilizing our ad technology to the fullest extent. Plus it's kind of fun to work with our ad server, so be sure to get the most out of it.
Campaign Duration
All advertising buys should have the duration set to provide enough "share of voice" to maximize performance. Depending on the nature of your campaign and your goals, what you want to do is reach as many unique website viewers as possible, up to three or four times, to maximize the campaign results. Smaller budgets should have shorter campaign durations. And for all budgets, please call us anytime!
