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Is the banner ad still relevant?

November 19, 2019 No Comments

The banner ad is 25 years old. Should marketers celebrate or commiserate?

Twenty-five years after its inception, is there still room for the humble banner ad?

Soon after the advert of the Internet and websites came the banner ad, a digital advertising phenomenon which has grown to become so common, it’s arguably background noise for most people today.

Back in the day, the banner ad and all 300 of its pixels was the be-all-end-all of Internet advertising. Now, technologies like artificial intelligence, programmatic and augmented reality have triggered a whole new way of advertising and led us to automatically adjusting, mobile-enabled ads that are highly personalised, dynamic, and targeted.

Yet, while the banner ad has evolved, the method of measuring it has not – much to marketers’ annoyance. The clickthrough rate (CTR) remains the main way these ads are measured. And by all reports, CTRs are abysmal – less than 0.6 per cent by nearly every report out there.

These dwindling results, along with declining consumer attention and growing use of ad blockers by a fatigued consumers, all means the banner ad has suffered from ever-decreasing CTR while being ignored for its rightful place in overall brand building.

CMO asked several industry experts if the banner ad still has a place in a marketing strategy, or if we should all continue tweaking the settings on our ad blockers.

CEO of IAB Australia, Gai Le Roy, said approximately one-fifth of the digital display market in Australia is still represented by what we would consider traditional old school ad formats, such as banners.

“And while they has been over taken by new formats including video and content/in-feed formats, they still have a role to play in the market,” she told CMO. “The beauty of the media market is that older ad formats, while representing a smaller slice of the market, don’t go away. But we get a broader range of offerings that marketers can use to get their messages to consumers.

“Luckily, as Internet speeds have increased, websites have been able to take heavier ad files than was possible in the early days and this has enabled creative to improve substantially since the first banner ad.”

However, what frustrates Le Roy is banners still often being measured using the wrong metrics. “It frustrates me that even though we have shown time and time again that there is no correlation between clickthrough and impact, the click through metric is still persists,” she continued.

“Our new research study, The Digital Brand Effect, illustrates banners with the right creative, frequency and targeting still have a role in today’s media environment.”

Digivizer CEO, Emma Lo Russo, said success in digital marketing lies in how relevant the content is to the audience and the context they are seeing it in. She claimed traditional banner advertising can still work from a brand perspective, but needs a multi-platform, multi-unit play to drive traffic or action.

“You need to think about who sees what in the journey from not knowing you, to buying from you, to referring you,” she said.

Criteo A/NZ commercial director, Colin Barnard, agreed the banner ad remains a central tool in modern marketing.

“Digital ads have radically evolved since 1994 and so too have the way people respond and interact with ads. Today’s consumers demand more from brands, with 55 per cent of Australians turning off when they see ads they’re not interested in, according to recent Criteo data,” he said.

“The core objectives of banner ads from brand awareness to sales conversion haven’t shifted a whole lot, however, the way we achieve these objectives has, due to a greater focus on creative design and implementation with the introduction of modern technologies like AI and machine learning.”

For Barnard, modern technologies, like AI, have morphed the traditional banner ad into a hyper-targeted tool to create highly personalised customer experiences. But again, he warned against measuring its worth via CTR.

“When it comes to measuring performance digital marketing, one danger is to only count the effectiveness of banners by their clickthrough rate,” Barnard said. “The end result can be somewhat unimaginative creative that incites action like lots of price and ‘click here’ messaging. If the average clickthrough rate is 0.5 per cent, that means 99.5 per cent of people who see these ads don’t click on that particular creative.

“There is an opportunity to increase brand messaging without overly affecting CTR so the 99.5 per cent still see a great representation of the brand even if they aren’t ready to click at that particular moment.”

For lower funnel banner ads, Barnard would like to see other metrics used in a comparative way between different campaigns to better gauge what the 99.5 per cent think. He saw surveys, A/B testing to push creative to the max, whilst not impacting performance, and post-view metrics, as some examples.

“The current situation shows the limitation of machine learning and performance metrics. There are still too many dull ads that underutilise the amazing canvas we have,” Barnard said. “For instance, machine learning-driven creative can result in very poor ads.”

To compensate, Criteo has machine learning-driven content but still has humans crafting templates and even overlaying video, MP4/HTML5 rich motion imagery to bring dynamism to ads, he added.

Head of sales at WeThinkMedia, Jane Stucci, said the banner ad still has relevance as part of a broader marketing plan.

“As digital tech continues to evolve it does create the opportunity now 25 years later to personalise your brand’s creative or message to a highly targeted audience, particularly with the use of dynamic creative allowing you to target the right audience with the right message at the right time on any device.

“As for measurement, is anything perfect or correct? The industry is moving in the right direction by questioning the traditional click through rate as the only measure of success with alternative metrics such as viewability.”

So there you have it: The humble banner ad still arguably has a role to play in both branding and sales. But like most marketing, it’s only as good as your wider omnichannel strategy.

By Vanessa Mitchell (CMO)

Sourced from CMO FROM IDG

In News

It’s not about length: SEO content trends to stay ahead of in 2020

November 14, 2019 No Comments

By Paul Melis

Hard as it may be to believe, it’s that time of year again – and no, I’m not talking about making Christmas lists, planning how best to avoid the in-laws over the festive season, and having mild panic attacks about how you’re going to afford all the presents and festivities that the coming months have in store. No, it’s the end of another year, which means it’s time to speculate about content trends for the coming 12 months.

Here are four trends that I think will have a significant impact on SEO content in 2020:

It’s not about length – it’s what you do with it that counts

As digital marketers, we sometimes get a little obsessed with hard and fast rules. It’s inevitable. We work in an industry based on understanding and algorithms, on following best practices, using fool-proof formulae, getting the inputs just right to achieve a precise result. A lot of the time, I think that’s what makes what we do rewarding. But I think one of the mistakes we make is to look for a right answer when there isn’t one.

The question of how long a piece of content should be is divisive because there really is no right answer. Actually, it’s worse than that. There are a lot of right answers. People have short attention spans, so writing concise, 500-word blogs is the way to go, right? But if you look at the top result for just about any search, you’ll find the word count rarely dips below a thousand. So longer must be better, then. Well, you can’t argue with the fact that most readers only get about halfway through a piece of content, and that many don’t even scroll to begin with. The reality is that there’s no ideal length for content, because length in itself doesn’t mean anything. What does matter is how well you’re answering the question, or addressing the needs of your reader.

In my experience, it’s safer to lean towards the longer side. There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a great-sounding blog title, and opening the link to find 200 words of half-baked, keyword-stuffed content that doesn’t really say anything at all. It’s equally painful, though, when you start reading a long-form article and realise the writer is trying to draw out a 300 word idea into 3,000. Ultimately, longer content is good, but there are certainly diminishing returns.

Voice search will make you question everything

‘Always read your writing aloud.’ That might be the single best piece of advice I’ve ever heard as a writer. And, since voice search is expected to account for as much as half of all online search traffic by 2020, it takes on a new meaning: if you aren’t reading your own writing out loud, Google’s going to do it for you, and you’d better make sure the results are good enough to drive interaction or conversion.

The key thing to realise here is that voice search is fundamentally different from text search. The average text search phrase, for example, is around one to three words, while the average voice search phrase hovers more around three to six words. Voice searches are also far more likely to be phrased as questions. People talk to their voice assistants like they’re talking to a real person, so it follows that content should respond in kind if it hopes to meet the needs of the searcher.

For content to soak up the lion’s share of voice searches, it needs to be written more conversationally than you might be used to, and it needs to hone in on answering the questions that the user is asking. Content that answers questions head-on, shows a clear understanding of search intent and sheds as much of the unnecessary detail as possible is bound to perform better for voice search traffic, so expect this trend to become increasingly prevalent in the coming months and years.

Zero is greater than one

Another consequence of voice assistants becoming the go-to search channel is the importance of Position Zero: whenever a user inputs a voice search query, their assistant will read out the position zero result before delivering the rest. So, even if you’re dominating the search results for the entire first page, a competitor with the zero spot is going to soak up 100% of the voice search traffic and leave your hard-fought position one content starved for clicks.

Gartner estimates that around a third of searches will be done without a screen at all in 2020, which means that anything beyond the position zero result might as well not exist for voice search purposes. Expect blogging content and other written forms to include an increasing amount of structured data, rich data snippets, and content specifically designed to rank above position 1. This will be particularly important for content with a local element (since a large part of voice search queries centre around local search) and bottom-of-the-funnel searches.

This time, it’s personal

There’s no doubt that personalised marketing messaging works. We live in the age of the individual consumer: people are accustomed to their social media feeds, email inboxes and mobile experiences being tailored to their preferences and interests. So, it follows that expectations are the same for any content they engage with while searching or browsing.

For advertising the remedy is rather simple: serve ads that are targeted at specific factors and show an awareness of the individual customer’s context, preferences and their position in the sales funnel. But for ‘raw’ SEO content – that is, blogs, website copy, landing pages, etc. – it’s a little less straightforward. Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go, you could include forms, quizzes and surveys to understand exactly who you’re talking to before serving them tailored content, or you could go the simpler route and profile your user base into different personas who are likely to respond to different messaging.

Expect increasingly tailored, topic-focused content to come to the fore even more so than it already has in recent years. Again, customers are increasingly engaging with content that makes real conversation with them and demonstrates an understanding of their context, preferences and what they’re looking for. The more granular you can get when it comes to understanding those factors, the better you’ll resonate with your readers.

By Paul Melis

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Digital advertising smashes $100 billion level

June 27, 2019 No Comments

By Todd Smith

Digital ad spending in the United States exceeded $100 billion for the first time last year, according to the latest Internet advertising report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Specifically, total domestic spending reached $107.5 billion, a 22 percent increase from 2017. Mobile advertising has become increasingly dominant, growing 40 percent year-over-year, to $69.9 billion. And video ad spending grew 37 percent to $16.3 billion.

In the past, mobile ad spend has lagged behind time spent on those devices. But now, “that parity is almost being reached. Eyeballs are being followed by dollars,” said Sue Hogan, the IAB’s senior vice president of research and measurement.”

PwC partner David Silverman acknowledged that this leads to an obvious follow-up: Once ad dollars catch up to consumer attention, will growth slow? In Silverman’s view, “the industry has found ways to evolve” in the past, and it will again.

“There’s other shifts that are occurring now,” he said, thanks to growth in digital audio advertising (up 23 percent to $2.3 billion), as well as other areas such as out-of-home advertising and designing ads for new devices.

One of the recurring concerns about the digital ad industry is its dominance by Facebook and Google. While the IAB report doesn’t single out specific companies, it does measure concentration in terms of how much spending is going to the top 10 ad sellers. In 2018, those sellers collected 77 percent of total spending — the IAB says the percentage has fluctuated between 69 percent and 77 percent in the past decade.

As for the effect of GDPR and other privacy regulation, Silverman said, “It certainly will have a significant impact, particularly on the use of data and AI in making advertisements more relevant and more effective,” but he suggested it’s too early to say precisely what the financial impact will be.

Hogan suggested that the California Consumer Protection Act could be more influential on U.S. ad spend. The IAB (which is a trade group representing online advertisers and publishers) has been advocating for federal regulation, rather than a state-by-state approach.

“I hope that we don’t get to the point where it becomes a strain on the industry,” she said. “I think more and more education is needed around that.”

New Orleans Times-Picayune entire staff laid off

The entire staff of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans is being laid off after the paper was sold to The Advocate, a rival newspaper.

The layoffs will impact all 161 staff members at the Times-Picayune, including 65 editors and reporters, according to a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act) filing with the Louisiana Workforce Commission as reported by the New York Post.

Advocate Publisher Dan Shea told the Post he planned to rehire an undetermined number of Times-Picayune staffers before combining the two publications in June as a daily paper and leveraging the nola.com website.

John and Dathel Georges, owners of the New Orleans Advocate, purchased the Times-Picayune and its nola.com website from Advance Publications for an undisclosed price.

The two newspapers have been strong competitors for nearly two centuries, with The Times-Picayune first publishing in 1837. The Advocate traces its roots back to 1842.

The Times-Picayune has experienced challenging times in the past few years. The Post reported its weekend circulation of 88,538 falling well below its circulation of 257,000 before Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005.

The layoffs reinforce the difficult positions of many giant media companies in today’s digital world. Media layoffs hit a 10-year high last year, with nearly 15,500 jobs being axed in 2019. Several other media outlets – Vice, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post – have all slashed job this year.

PR Pros Say Media Relations Still Very Important Skill

PR News and its Media Relations Working Group – composed of 23 media relations and communications folks, surveyed PR pros during March and April 2018 to gauge attitudes about media relations today and the future.

More than 400 responded to questions about the difficulty of obtaining media coverage, the importance (or not) of media relations and earned coverage in an age of social media influencers and brand-created content. The survey also allowed respondents to describe new tactics they have adopted to boost media relations efforts. Nearly 300 did.

A majority of PR pros (84 percent) are upbeat about the future of traditional media relations, where practitioners pitch stories and other ideas to media, hoping it results in coverage, according to PR News. By the way, 84 percent was by the far the largest response to any question in the survey.

Blockbuster Mic | Doris Day Was the Hollywood Brand in 1960s

Doris Day, the famous movie actress whose electric personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star – and Hollywood brand queen in the early 1960s – died earlier this week. She was 97 years-young!

Day began as a big band singer, and from the start had the Midas touch! One of her first records, “Sentimental Journey,” sold more than a million copies, and she had a string of other hits before her meteoric movie career took flight.

She starred in nearly 40 movies that began with “Romance on the High Seas” in 1948 through “With Six You Get Eggroll” in 1968. On the Silver Screen she transformed from cute girl roles in the 1950s to more sultry comedies that brought her four first-place rankings in the yearly popularity poll of theater owners, a feat equaled by no other except Shirley Temple.

Following “Pillow Talk,” which won Day her only Academy Award nomination, she was called on to defend her virtue for the rest of her career in similar but lesser movies, while Hollywood turned to more graphic sex movies.

By the time she retired in 1973, after starring for five years on the hit CBS comedy “The Doris Day Show,” Day had been dismissed as a goody-two-shoes, the leader of Hollywood’s chastity brigade,

Day, however, was a trailblazer, one of the few actresses of her era to play women who had a real profession, and her characters were often more passionate about their career than about their co-stars.

In 2011, three years after she received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award, Day surprised many by releasing her first album in nearly two decades, “My Heart,” which featured mostly songs she recorded for “Doris Day’s Best Friends” but never released commercially.

Day was a pioneer, trailblazer and Hollywood brand champion who brought bravery, pizzazz and luster to the Silver Screen!

By Todd Smith

TODD SMITH is president and chief communications officer of Deane, Smith & Partners, a full-service branding, PR, marketing and advertising firm with offices in Jackson. The firm — based in Nashville, Tenn. — is also affiliated with Mad Genius. Contact him at [email protected], and follow him @spinsurgeon.

Sourced from Mississippi’s Business Journal

In News

Three tech trends set to impact digital advertising beyond 2019

May 21, 2019 No Comments

By Nikki Gilliland

Global digital advertising revenues are on the up, growing 17% in 2018 to reach $251 billion (or 45% of global advertising revenues).

This rise is expected to continue, with digital advertising predicted to represent 50% of total advertising spend across the world this year.

While immediate investment is something of a certainty, what trends are set to impact the digital ad industry as we head further into the year and beyond?

Subscribers can read more on the topic in Econsultancy’s Getting to Grips with Digital Advertising: Best Practice Guide. In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the most notable innovations that advertisers should be aware of.

Artificial intelligence

We have only just scratched the surface of what artificial intelligence can do for the advertising industry. So far, this has largely extended to improving ad relevancy, optimising spend, or enhancing personalisation.

One good example of AI being utilised in this way is Toyota’s 2017 ad campaign for its Mirai vehicle. The campaign made use of natural language processing in order to create advertising copy tailored to thousands of potential buyers and their specific needs.

According to AdWeek, Saatchi LA did this by training IBM’s Watson AI marketing engine with fifty scripts of relevant copy based on location, behavioural insights, and occupation data. Watson was then able to deliver thousands of pieces of copy (explaining the car’s features and how they are relevant to the user), with each one sounding as if they were written by a human. The campaign ran solely on Facebook, allowing Toyota to make use of the platform’s complex behavioural data and targeting capabilities.

This intersection of creativity and data (whereby the AI is used to enhance human input) is where many experts see the technology’s big potential. It is far removed from stereotypical assumptions about AI.

In Econsultancy’s report, Marek Wrobel, Head of Media Futures at Havas, notes: “The best results happen when AI works with human insight, and in our industry, this will mean we’ll have more time to spend on creativity rather than, for example, reporting or optimisation.”

Conversational technology

It is the norm for brands to target users with advertising on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. However, chatbots have also enabled brands to talk to users in text-based conversations, and to create an informal and less disruptive style of communication.

Could the next step be a big shift to messaging services like WhatsApp?

In 2018, Facebook’s WhatsApp messaging service introduced a business version of its app. This means that businesses can now share their company details within a profile, as well as handle customer service enquiries and interactions. This is a different proposition to WhatsApp allowing intrusive ads onto its platform. However, the social messaging platform hasn’t been quite so firm in its stance against this either. In late 2018, it was reported that WhatsApp was to launch ads in its Status feature, marking its first real foray into monetisation.

Whether or not WhatsApp expands on ads, experts predict that we will see brands of all kinds start to seriously consider the app from a marketing perspective. Peter Buckley, Communications Planner at Facebook, explains: “If you think about how you communicate with your friends and family, it’s most often messaging. Yet businesses are a little bit slow on the uptake with messaging – communications are most often via call centres or email.”

In future then, we can expect to see a shift to messaging platforms, in order for businesses to enhance both customer service as well as marketing.

Connected technology

Advertisers must think differently in the context of a connected world. This is one of the biggest takeaways from Econsultancy’s report.

This is because technology such as smartwatches, cars, and household appliances (like fridges or thermostats) have opened up a wealth of valuable new data and potential insight for advertisers to draw upon. Of course, some brands are already making use of this data. Take Siemens, for example, which has partnered with Finish dishwasher tablets. Siemens’ ‘Home Connect’ technology updates the owner’s Amazon shopping basket when their supply of dishwasher tablets is running low.

In a more simplistic sense, the connected world also just means the opportunity for a larger amount of screens – i.e. on our car dashboard or freezer door. This means that advertisers will need to think beyond connected TV’s and smartphones (and standard 16:9 ads).

That being said, advertisers must also think differently in terms of how they approach advertising on connected devices. Providing something of value for consumers is key, and a necessity if brands want to ensure real results (rather than apathy towards an ad-saturated world).

By Nikki Gilliland

Sourced from Econsultancy

In News

Marketing Terms & Digital Advertising Acronyms You Should Know

May 2, 2019 No Comments

Sourced from AdEspresso

When it comes to digital advertising and marketing terms, acronyms like UGC, GDN, ROAS, RTB, SOV, and even TrV are commonly tossed around when discussing campaigns.

If you’re not familiar with them, you’re not alone.

Although shorthand ways of describing concepts are nothing new, the ever-expanding laundry list of industry abbreviated terms can confuse even the most seasoned and savvy of digital marketing professionals.

The world of Web marketing and paid ads is littered with technical jargon, catchphrases, and abbreviations. And anything that can be turned into a catchy acronym often is.

While some online marketing terms have become more widely known as marketing has gone mainstream, many acronyms remain unknown outside the industry — and some are even mystery to many people inside it.

Here’s our compilation of acronyms you should know and what they all mean:

General Marketing Terms

B2B: Business to Business

One business making a commercial transaction with another business, from wholesale product purchases to providing services.

B2C: Business to Consumer

The traditional business model of businesses selling directly to consumers, including local retail business, ecommerce, online banking, insurance, residential real estate, and many other products and services.

CX: Customer Experience

One of two commonly used marketing terms (the other being “consumer experience”) used to describe every interaction people have with a company throughout the buying process that influences a prospect or customer’s perception of the brand.

CTA: Call to Action

A hyperlink, button or image that drives the reader to take action on content or ads by downloading, calling, registering or attending an event.

DMA: Designated Market Area

A geographic location representing a neighborhood, city, county, state, region or country you choose to target.

IAB: Interactive Advertising Bureau

A trade organization that sets the industry standard for digital advertising, including ad specifications, best practices and business standards for anything digital advertising related.

KPI: Key Performance Indicators

Metric used across all industries to evaluate the success of various marketing strategies and campaign goals by tracking and measuring progress in areas brand awareness, lead generation, bounce rate, and sales conversions

MAP: Marketing Automation Platform

A technology that assists marketers in converting prospects to customers by removing high-touch, manually repetitive processes with automated solutions. The email campaign service MailChimp and marketing automation software Marketo are examples of MAPs.

NPS: Net Promoter Score

A survey-based customer satisfaction metric that measures (on a scale of 0 to 10) how likely people are to recommend your brand or company to others.

ROI: Return On Investment

A ratio between the net profit earned from campaigns and the cost of investing in marketing and advertising.

SMB: Small and Medium Sized Businesses

Businesses with between 5 million and 200 million in annual revenues. Also refers to businesses with 100 or fewer employees (small) and from 100 to 999 employees (medium-sized).

SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Bound

The process of providing criteria for clear defining marketing or advertising goals or establishing objectives and outlining the action steps required to achieve them.

Digital Advertising & Marketing Terms

BM: (Facebook) Business Manager

A free integrated tool used on Facebook to manage ad accounts and pages from a single location

CAN-SPAM: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing

A U.S. law passed in 2003 that prohibits businesses from sending targeted emails without permission. (Marketers must include an unsubscribe option in all emails and they should not add names to it without the express permission of the recipient.)

CPC: Cost Per Click

An online advertising revenue model through which advertisers are charged by the publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) for each time a user clicks on their advertisement.

CPL: Cost Per Lead

All of the costs associated with generating a lead, including advertising dollars spent, collateral creation, web hosting fees and various other costs.

CPM: Cost Per Mille

A method publishers use to assign a cost to advertise on their platform by charging per 1000 advertisement impressions (M is the Roman numeral for 1000) through which advertisers are charged for every time their ad is seen, not how many times it’s clicked.

CR: Conversion Rate

The number of people who take action on an advertisement, divided by the number that could have. For example, if your email campaign reaches 100 prospects and 25 of them respond, your conversion rate would be 25%.

CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization

A system for increasing the percentage of visitors or prospects that convert into customers or take any desired action on websites, landing pages, social media and CTAs. A/B split testing is commonly used to determine which version of an ad or web page (version A or version B) is more successful in optimizing conversion rates.

CTR: Click Through Rate

A performance indicator that measures the percentage of prospects or visitors who take the next action on an advertisement, web page or email. For example, in the case of a landing page, the CTR would be the total number of people who visit the page divided by the number who click and move on to the next step.

DSP: Demand Side Platform

A technology that allows advertisers to efficiently purchase display ad inventory across Real Time Bidding (RTB) networks like Google.

eCP(x): Effective Cost Per (fill in the blank)

Average spend based on total budget and results. The “e” can be applied to all cost models (such as CPM, CPL, or CPA). With any digital advertising campaign, you may have several placements, cost models, and budgets in place, and knowing your average spend is important to determine the effectiveness of your campaign.

GA: Google Analytics

This is a data-driven Google tool that is used by marketers to track, analyze and report website, app, and ad traffic to better understand their audience, reach, activity and metrics.

GDN: Google Display Network

Google’s network of over 2 million websites and apps that show display ads on their web pages, reaching over 90% of people on the internet, where businesses target consumers and other businesses on the display network using strategic topical keywords , placement on specific webpages and remarketing.

PPC: Pay Per Click

A digital advertising method through which publishers charge advertisers for each action (click) they take on ads. See also CPC.

PR: Page Rank

An algorithm used by Google to rank web pages in their search engine results using a numerical weight based on a number of different, confidential and proprietary criteria.

QS: Quality Score

A metric used by Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Bing that determines both the rank and cost per click of digital ads.

ROAS – Return On Ad Spend

A PPC marketing metric that demonstrates the profit made as compared to the amount of money spent on the ads. Similar to ROI.

RON: Run of Network

A low-cost, high-reach form of online advertising delivery through which advertisers generally have no control over ad placement in return for lower rates and a broader reach on random pages of any site that is part of an ad network. Because of their low CPM, RON ads often used for testing using age or gender targeting analysis.

ROS: Run of Site

A form of online advertising that delivers and rotates digital ads on a specific website that advertisers use to maximize their budget without sacrificing exposure.

RTB: Real Time Bidding

A method of purchasing unsold ad inventory by CPM through an auction like — the now-ceased Facebook Exchange (FBX) — where the highest bid takes inventory priority.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

A technical and creative marketing discipline focused on growing visibility and improve rankings in organic (non-paid) results to increase awareness and drive traffic. It is based on algorithmic variables on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

SEM: Search Engine Marketing

The promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.

SERP: Search Engine Results Pages

The pages displayed by search engines in response to a keyword query made by a user.

SM: Social Media

Platforms that allow users to post personal and/or business text, image and video content and socially interact.
Examples include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat and LinkedIn.

SMM: Social Media Marketing

The discipline of using social media platforms to promote businesses through organic and paid campaigns.

SOV: Share of Voice

A calculation based on a percentage your ad is seen versus other advertisers. For example, if there are four advertisers rotating ads evenly on a page, each advertiser would have a 25 percent share of voice. If that same page has just one advertiser, that advertiser would have 100 percent share of voice.

SSP: Supply Side Platform

An automated technology also called sell-side platforms or yield optimization platforms, that allow publishers to maximize the prices at which they sell ad impressions.

TrV: TrueView

Video advertising sold by Google and run through YouTube, which includes in-stream, discovery and bumper ads.

UGC: User-generated content

Content created by users of a blog, social media network or online system or service.

VTR: View Through Rate

A metric used to report a ratio of the number of completed views of a skippable video ad, based on the number of impressions it received

Website Marketing Terms

BR: Bounce Rate

A bounce rate refers to the action a user takes when they land on a page of your website, and leave to go to another site (i.e. bouncing off of your page).

It can also refer to emails that don’t reach an inbox.

CMS: Content Management System

An application that consolidates and facilitates the creation, editing, management, and distribution of content. Generally used to refer to a website; WordPress is an example of a popular CMS.

IBL: Inbound Link

A hyperlink leading back to your website from a third-party site.

DNS: Domain Name System

A protocol that translates website URLs (which use alphabetic characters) into IP addresses (that use numeric characters).

GDD: Growth Driven Design

The design or development of a website in intentional increments through making continuous data-driven adjustments.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language

A set of codes that are used by programmers use to create web pages and tell web browsers how to display them. Each individual code is called an element, or a tag, which is used to make up the structure and content of websites.

RSS – Really Simple Syndication

A way for users to keep track of updates to multiple websites (news sites, blogs, and others) in a single place and in an easily-viewable format, as opposed to having to manually check every single site individually.

UI: User Interface

A series of screens, pages, and visual elements and other conduits — either graphical or voice-controlled — that enable people to interact with a website, app, product or service.

UV: Unique Visitor

The number of individuals visiting a page on a website during a set period of time.

UX: User Experience

How a user interacts and engages with a website, app or platform (where they click, tap, swipe and visit), which can be shaped by testing different page designs, layouts, CTAs, colors, and content to improve conversion rates.

XML: Extensible Markup Language

A language used to define a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. For example, an XML sitemap is designed to help search engine crawler robots to easily find all of the pages for a given website.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it: a primer on acronyms for some of the more important digital marketing terms.

From basic marketing terms to more specialized ad network-specific lingo, this list will help to build your vocabulary and navigate the increasingly complicated digital marketing and advertising industry.

New acronyms regularly pop up, so continually work to learn emerging marketing terms to help you better understand every aspect of your promotional efforts.

Sourced from AdEspresso

In News

Put on an alternative spread this Easter

April 15, 2019 No Comments

By Caroline Parry

Indulgence and, of course, chocolate will always be crucial to Easter, but increasingly this holiday is seen as a celebration of springtime, and people are seeking gifts and experiences that reflect this shift.

This is no doubt that Easter is important to us, with 57% of consumers considering it to be a “proper” holiday, according to a 2018 YouGov survey. This is compared to say, Mother’s Day, which Britons do not see as such a big occasion.

Its importance in our lives is reflected in our social behaviour with Facebook seeing year-on-year growth of 1.6x in our conversations about Easter in 2017. The top five topics discussed around that time are significant others, food, beverages, parties and events, and travel, while the top trending Easter hashtags are #love, #chocolate and #family.

Let’s take a look at some emerging UK Easter trends for 2019 and supporting marketing activation tips advertisers could consider on Facebook platforms in line with these….

Alternative indulgence

Confectionary sales in the UK grew from £375m in 2017 to £395m in 2018. However, while chocolate will always have a place on the shelves at Easter, increasingly consumers are looking for Easter treats to marry with their growing concerns about sustainability and health. Many more of us will be searching for guilt-free ways to spoil ourselves this Easter!

With reducing plastic waste now high up on the agenda of most consumers, forward-thinking brands are thinking outside the traditional egg box to meet these concerns. Innovative chocolate brands, such as Montezuma, vegan brand Goupie and dairy-free brand Booja Booja, are using recyclable packaging, some of which is reusable.

Treating ourselves isn’t limited to gorging on chocolate, and for many people self-care is becoming the alternative way of indulging. Health and beauty e-tailer Lookfantastic struck a chord last Easter with its £65 Beauty Egg, which offered a limited edition collection of seven ‘must-have’ products packaged in a metal egg. No surprise then that this year’s Easter Beauty Egg Bungle had an early waiting list.

Marketing activation tip: Think outside the Easter egg box, by showing more options than just chocolate in your marketing campaigns. How about a carousel ad format where you can showcase a wider brand story and message through different images? For e.g. chocolate, eco packaging, as well as an idea for guilt-free or healthier indulgence / pampering.

The great Easter escape

With family a top trending hashtag over the Easter break, it is a holiday that is increasingly about sharing special moments together. With 72% of consumers feeling no pressure to buy Easter gifts, according to a 2018 Mintel Seasonal Shopping report, we are increasingly swapping presents for social experiences.

Spending on activities far outpaces gifts, according to the same Mintel report, with an average of £113 spent on sharing experiences together compared to £67 on presents. British adults love to hark back to their childhoods when out with friends, with many getting their Easter fun fix by going bowling or trampolining.

Families also love to get out and about, and the many events staged by brands around Easter are ideal opportunities for spending time together. Crafting days and Easter egg hunts, such as the Cadbury partnership with the National Trust, are always big draws, but alternative events such as the Science Museum’s Power Up, which combines gaming with an exhibition, appeal to both parents and kids.

As people prioritise spending time together and creating that sense of belonging, it is little wonder that 10 times more photos are posted and shared during the Easter breaks than before or after.

Marketing activation tip: You can broadcast direct from events so that a wider audience can join the fun and conversation by using the Instagram live feature! Bridge the real world and digital divide seamlessly. By leveraging Facebook marketing partners you can create ads and messaging which are triggered contingent upon weather. We all know British weather can be unreliable, so it’s handy to have bespoke messaging ready to roll out in rainy or sunny circumstances over the Easter weekend.

Creating a meaningful Easter

With Facebook seeing a spike in conversation around food, beverages and parties on Easter Day itself, we know the Easter feast is a vital part of the holiday. British consumers are investing more time and money in making food more meaningful by buying seasonal produce, often sourcing key ingredients locally at stores or markets.

Supporting British producers and local retailers adds real meaning and a sense of story to our Easter food. It’s the reason that over half of shoppers surveyed by digital marketing agency Silverbean, said it is the time of year when buying home-grown products and using local suppliers is essential.

Spring is a time of abundance when it comes to vegetables, and with interest in organic foods and local, independent shopping spiking around this time of year, many turn to social to celebrate their love for fresh local produce. And they really do love it, #rhubarb and #artichoke boast almost a million tagged boasts between them.

Even the major retailers understand shoppers are looking for ways to show their support for local and British suppliers. Morrisons uses a “blue passport” to mark up its lamb products as British and highlight their home-grown credentials. Meanwhile, Hyke Gin is tackling both local and food waste by taking unwanted grapes from the British supply chain and turning it into gin.

Marketing activation tip: If you have great content like Easter ingredients, recipes and pictures to share, consider trying the Instant Experiences templates to quickly create valuable interactions with your customers. Did you know Instant Experiences are loading faster than ever? – now 15 times faster than standard mobile websites – so you can use them to seamlessly connect to an audience. Also, if you have a great local story to tell about your product, you can geo target ads to a certain audience where that messaging would resonate strongly.

Easter, a season of sun

With Easter bringing the first Bank Holidays of the year, it is an excellent opportunity for a holiday or breaks. Almost half of the £1.1bn spent over the Easter weekend in 2018 was spent on Easter getaways, according to travel website Kayak, and 89% of Easter conversation on Facebook in the UK was on mobile.

After the long winter, many are chasing the sunshine and warmth. Back in 2016, the “cool” and adventurous Scandi destinations were booming, last year saw consumers look to sunnier climes. Dubai was the most booked destination for Easter in 2018, with the perennially popular Spanish cities of Malaga and Alicante close behind.

Once again, environmental issues rate high on the agenda for British consumers. Green mini-breaks are becoming the preferred choice for many consumers. The Hilton London Bankside has responded with the creation of the world’s first vegan hotel room, which features suede-like furnishings made from mushroom matter.

Marketing activation tip: Travel insurance brands may want to up-weight their activity on Facebook and Instagram as we know most people leave it last minute to get their insurance sorted! Geo targeting such ads around airports and stations can prove effective. Hotels and retreats can showcase their unique or new look sustainable offerings in a more immersive way by using the power of 360° videos and boosting that content as ads to maximise reach and amplification.

Summary

Easter is still very much about chocolate eggs and bunnies, but consumers increasingly see it as an opportunity for treating themselves, and for spending time with family and friends by sharing great experiences. It is increasingly important however that enjoying these holiday moments is not at the expense of their wider concerns around health and sustainability.

By Caroline Parry

Sourced from The Drum

In News

How Much Digital Advertising Is Too Much?

December 5, 2018 No Comments

By Greg Sobiech

It’s been almost two years since Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble, told the digital advertising industry to clean up its act. The e, currently the world’s second largest CPG company, was tired of what he perceived as massive waste in the digital advertising supply chain. He was referring to the lack of transparency between advertisers and digital agencies and the alphabet soup of ad-tech players that created complexity without always clearly defining value.

Since Pritchard was the man holding the purse strings of one of the single largest advertising budgets in the world, the digital industry stood up and took notice.

Getting Tough

Since that time agencies, publishers, and the ad-tech industry have all taken steps to increase transparency, both around media quality and around where and how advertising dollars are actually spent.

In mid-2017, Pritchard declared the job of cleaning up digital roughly half done citing reductions in fraud and increased transparency. However, he didn’t stop there.

Between April and July of 2017, P&G cut more than $100 million in digital advertising spend, citing the continued prevalence of bot traffic and brand safety challenges presented by risky content. These reductions remained in place from July until December, removing roughly another $100 million from the market by the end of the year. The reduction was meant to reduce waste, pulling dollars away from risky, fraudulent, and non-viewable inventory. But the final impact went much further than reducing waste.

The Result

According to P&G, the result of these dramatic cuts to its digital spend was a 20% reduction in ineffective ad spend. In some cases, P&G reduced its spend by as much as 50% with specific big-name partners with no reported negative impact on ROI.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the CPG leader measured a 10% increase in overall reach of its campaigns. On the surface, this result is counterintuitive, P&G reduced its spend and the overall number of placements, but reached more consumers. The result was likely driven by the increased efficiency of carefully pruning ineffective inventory and reallocating remaining budget to higher quality placements.

P&G competitor Unilever, which likewise commands market-shaping amounts of ad spend, similarly reduced its total advertising budget. The CPG giant reduced spend by nearly 51% across digital channels. While Unilever doesn’t break out its ad spend, the company similarly reported no ill-effects on ROI from the dramatic spending cuts.

What next?

Experiments by CPG leaders like P&G and Unilever have made waves in the market, revealing that ad spend alone doesn’t drive value when not tied to quality metrics like viewable inventory.

By pushing the envelope on quality these advertisers learned that some of the seemingly immutable paradigms of digital — the scale is king, and quality is beyond our control — weren’t as unshakable previously assumed.

So how should advertisers proceed based on this information? Three tips to keep in mind:

The platforms can be moved. When advertisers put pressure on the digital advertising ecosystem, the ecosystem gave way. Agencies and ad platforms previously assumed to be immovable made a concerted effort to provide quality. That’s a powerful lesson, especially for brands that feel powerless in the face of the duopoly platforms of Google and Facebook. Collective action can reshape the ad ecosystem for the better.
Measure the things that matter. Pure scale, as measured by impressions, has been the standard metric for advertising success, but P&G’s experiment proved that quality of impressions had more impact on ROI than brute number of impressions.
Budget isn’t everything. For marketers who don’t have P&G-sized ad budgets to play with, the numbers indicate that it’s still possible to drive meaningful results. A focused media strategy that prioritizes context and quality can carry the day even in the face of smaller budgets.

By Greg Sobiech

Sourced from MediaPost

In News

Preparing for the takeover: Google voice search SEO strategies

September 25, 2018 No Comments

By Jason Hall

Whether or not you’ve embraced it, voice search is here to stay and it looks like it will be the next biggest trend in social media. In 2014, 41% of adults surveyed said they use voice search at least once a day. By 2020, 50% of all searches will be by voice search.

Google controls the lion’s share of the search engine market and it is essential to optimize your website.

Speech and type patterns are different

Think about how you perform a search when you’re typing your query rather than speaking. When you’re typing, you’re more likely to use a shorthand and leave out superfluous words. Conversely, when you speak, you’re more likely to speak in a complete statement.

For example, when searching for the best restaurants in New York. In Google, you will type “best restaurants NYC”. However, with a voice search, you will ask “What are the best restaurants in New York City?”

Google and other search engines have been working on improving the programming and machine learning that pick up speech patterns. What this means is that while you may need to enunciate to get Google to understand you at first, it should soon become familiar with your accent.

Long tail keywords are crucial

While the days of short tail keywords are well behind us, voice search makes targeting the correct long tail keywords more important than ever.

Marketers can optimize both types of search by using conversational, long tail keywords. The new keywords are very specific because they are being searched by people further down the buyer’s journey.

Instead of writing a blog post called “10 Home Decor Trends for 2018”, write for a more targeted audience with the post “10 Vintage-Inspired Home Decor Trends for Small Apartments”.

How to use Google voice search SEO Strategies

With regular search SEO, being within the first ten results and displayed on the front page of the search engine results was enough. Voice search makes this game more competitive because now all SEO and SEM marketers are aiming to have their content returned as the featured snippet that is displayed above the first organic result. The featured snippet typically displays the text from your site answering the question and an image.

How is the featured snippet generated?

There are two parts to how Google builds the featured snippet to display at the top of the search results.

Part of it is based on the same elements dictating your position in a search engine results page regardless of the type of search being conducted. This includes your domain authority, backlinks, social media engagement and more. This is to say that building a high-quality site that is fast and secure is still important.

The other half is based on how Google reads the content on your website. It ranks the text on your website based on the size of the font. Titles are the most important and then subheaders formatted in H2.

When performing a search, Google is looking for pages with the relevant keywords in the titles, subheaders and URL along with an authoritative, speedy and secure website for delivery as the featured snippet.

Use trigger words in your long-tail keywords

Keep in mind that people who are searching by voice are either in a rush or on-the-go. To get your content into that answer box, you need to use these popular “trigger” words when creating content. These phrases should appear not just in your post title, but in subheadings, the URL and meta descriptions as well. The most popular trigger words in voice searches are “how”, “what” and “best”.

Use tools like Google Trends and Google Suggest for ideas about what content you can generate based on these trigger words and keywords that apply to your site. When creating your posts, try to answer a question up near the top of the post and then follow it up with a relevant, well-researched, easy to read and informative post.

Think about how and where you want Google to display your content

Google prefers that voice search results are short and easy to read. At the same time, it seems to prefer long-form content (over 1000 words) as opposed to short-form content. Confusing, I know.

It comes down to the type of questions that are being asked. For search queries that have a simple or clear answer, Google wants something that is brief and accurate.

In order to catch both the Google Home and Chrome users, think about how to structure your posts so that Google can find an answer users can click to find more detailed information. Stick with simple vocabulary and shorter sentences to maintain readability.

It may be daunting to hear all the digital marketing pundits talk about how voice search is going to disrupt everything we know about search engines. It’s important to remember that voice SEO is still just SEO.

Now you know what Google is looking for when choosing what to select for its answer box and how to use Google voice search will put you be in a better position to take advantage of this new trend.

By Jason Hall

Jason Hall, founder, FiveChannels

Sourced from The Drum

In News

AppNexus takes on Google and Facebook with tool that offers ‘100% viewable buying’

June 25, 2018 No Comments

By Rebecca Stewart

AppNexus is looking to take on the Facebook-Google ‘duopoly’ with a tool it has claimed will give advertisers “100% viewable buying at scale”.

The product, dubbed ‘guaranteed views’ will give brands the chance to purchase only ads that they classify as ‘viewable’ against their own standards across the web, offering a solution to the typically complex process brands and agencies often have to go through when setting up threshold viewability targeting online.

Allowing clients to target “the entire open internet” AppNexus’ latest feature will let buyers use viewability as a given outcome. The company didn’t reveal which buyers had been testing the guaranteed views, but said clients “typically” see improvement in cost-per-view, unique reach, click-through rate (CTR) and cost-per-click (CPC).

AppNexus, which has been vocal about the “considerable strain” it believes to have been placed on the industry through the dominance of the duopoly, said it believes this fresh tool “will help reverse the disproportionate flow of advertising dollars going to walled gardens like Google and Facebook.”

Viren Tellis, senior director, marketplace management, AppNexus claimed a point of difference for guaranteed views was that instead of layering multiple optimization types, “buyers can assume viewability is a given” and focus on achieving the performance KPIs advertisers care about.

While the move from adtech firm doesn’t guarantee buyers 100% in-view ads; instead giving them the option to purchase their inventory only against their measurement standards, it comes amid ongoing discussion between advertisers about what exactly that standard should be.

Just months ago, the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (Isba) launched a 100% viewability standard in the UK, calling for brands to be given the facility to buy digital display ads in 100% view.

Key industry figures are split on what exactly the viewability standard should be. Unilever’s top marketer Keith Weed, for instance, subscribes to the 100% view. Others like rival Procter and Gamble (P&G) believe in the standard set by US-based body the Media Ratings Council (MRC) that ads should be at least 50% in view.

According to the World Federation of Advertisers, in the UK alone almost £600m per-year is believed to be wasted on non-viewable ads, with 63% of members saying they are now only investing in viewable impressions which meet industry standards.

Facebook currently offers buyers 100% viewability on some products in tandem with Moat. Google, meanwhile, lets advertisers, agencies and publishers using its active view product to see custom metrics that allow them to go beyond transacting on the Media Ratings Council (MRC) defined industry standard for viewability (which is 50%).

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

In News

Native Video study on open web highlights consumer shift

June 20, 2018 No Comments

By Dale Lovell

he power of video advertising may be well documented, but as consumer behaviour changes amid familiarity with video browsing on mobile devices, marketers who think the rules of engagement for digital video have already been written – and that there is a one size fits all approach – should think again.

The rise and effectiveness of native video on social media has been well researched to date. Engagement rates, reach, frequency and return on investment studies all show positive associations. But until now, there have been few studies showing the rise and performance of native video formats across the open web, specifically on premium publisher environments, where in-feed native video formats are becoming increasingly common.

We recently sought to fill that void through an analysis of more than 30 million in-feed video views run across our platform from January to April 2018. While we expected to be able to report findings on native video on the open web that were in line with the positive findings in social media, we didn’t expect that our findings would challenge the very notion of ‘what works’ in native video. But that’s precisely what happened.

Conventional wisdom in the video space, based on social data, has indicated that less is more when it comes to native video advertising, with many espousing that anything longer than 6 seconds in native video is simply too long. However, our findings would seem to contradict the perceived wisdom that mobile users have limited attention spans and are only interested in short video content.

According to our findings, smartphone users are more likely to spend time engaging with long-form video ads compared to 6-second ads when executed correctly. In fact, 72% of mobile users who have watched 6 seconds will continue to watch and engage with video up to 22 seconds. When native video reaches 15 to 22 seconds in length across premium publisher environments, mobile and tablet users that have watched this far are significantly more engaged than desktop users.

The evolution of our ‘mobile minds’

Perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising that people’s attention spans for native video seem to be growing longer. While the findings in our report represent the first of their kind in native video, there have been several studies undertaken around the attention of mobile phone users when it comes to reading. Over time, conclusions have shifted.

One study in 2010 found that reading on a mobile device was impaired when content was presented on a mobile-size screen versus a larger computer screen. But a similar study, undertaken six years later in 2016, showed different results. This study, conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group, concluded that there were no practical differences in the comprehension scores of participants, whether they were reading on a mobile device or a computer. In fact, the study found comprehension on mobile was about 3% higher than on a computer for content that was just over 400 words in length, and at an easier level to read.

Why the difference in results? It’s very possible that, over the period between 2010 and 2016 — the exact period during which smartphones became ubiquitous — we’ve all become more accustomed to reading on smaller screens. It’s reasonable to assume that the challenges the average person had reading on a small screen back in 2010 no longer apply now that people have adjusted to life on those smaller screens.

In a similar manner, it would appear that user behavior is changing around video consumption on mobile devices as well.

Well-held assumptions that less-is-more for video length and the broader worries about a crisis in user attention spans very well may prove to have been misplaced.

Creating compelling video content

As attention spans for native video lengthen, marketers would do well to reassess their best practices as it relates to creating content for mobile consumption. In particular, native video creators should think carefully about improving video performance during the key drop-off periods on a specific device.

For videos that will be consumed on mobile or tablet, videos should be edited to pack a punch in the first 6 seconds, in order to draw in users. The latest data suggests that the optimal length for native video content on mobile and tablet should be between 15 and 22 seconds. After 22 seconds, user interest does wane. If videos have to be longer, marketers should ensure that there are more-exciting sequences and enticing calls to action around 22 seconds, in order to maintain viewer interest up to 30 seconds.

If nothing else, these recent findings demonstrate that marketers must remain fluid in their understanding of how users engage with content on their devices. Behaviour is shifting, and yesterday’s best practices won’t necessarily apply tomorrow.

By Dale Lovell

Dale Lovell is co-founder of Adyoulike

Sourced from THE DRUM