As much as digital marketers talk about the importance of A/B testing, it’s still unnerving to pour your creative energy and resources into a banner ad campaign that doesn’t perform. You wonder if you need more high impact ad formats, better banner ads, a different digital production agency or all the above!
Luckily, improving your banner ad campaign doesn’t have to be a nail-biting experience. Try out these simple tweaks to turn your next so-so campaign into a success.
Learn to love retargeting
Banner ad
Are you ready to buy something, every time you walk into a store? Neither are your target customers, especially when the ‘store’ is their entire browsing experience on the web. That’s why retargeting – serving up different versions of your campaign message across different platforms and screens, thanks to tracking pixels – is so powerful. It enables you to try different messaging and high impact ad formats in different places and scenarios. The result: increasing your target audience’s awareness of your brand and the chance that the right ad will be in the right place at the right time, connecting with and driving them to take the desired action. You can easily build out a retargeting campaign with your digital production agency. They can just repurpose the brand assets they already have on file, saving you from building out a new stable of creative.
For high impact ad formats, think multifaceted campaigns
HTML5 Banner Ads
We build a lot of a la carte deliverables – banner ads, landing pages, interactive emails and more – but the most effective campaigns are multifaceted, with a strategy that relies on deploying a variety of device-specific banner ads, emails, landing pages and social media posts. A handful of high impact ads are great but a subtle, consistent exposure to your campaign messages is the most effective way to get through to your audience. Aim for uniformity and try to have the same digital production agency build all your creative. Your messaging, look and feel will be more consistent, boosting brand recall and increasing the effectiveness of your campaign.
Rethink what digital advertising looks like for you
Interactive production
It seems like every day, there are exciting new technological innovations for display advertising popping up. Digital marketers both want and feel pressured to add the latest shiny object to their next campaign. Don’t get us wrong – as a digital production agency, we’re just as susceptible to falling in love with cutting edge trends like interactive emails, micro-videos and 360 experiences. But there are still so many possibilities with existing technologies. Video, animation, HTML5 development, emails and interactive experiences (think gamification elements or giving the user control over the ad) are at the core of great high impact ad formats and successful banner ad campaigns. And many brands still aren’t leveraging these existing options effectively, leaving the field wide open for your next campaign.
Build good banner ads
Digital Creative Production
We’ve talked a lot about what makes a good banner ad – here, here and here for starters – and it boils down to four things. The best high impact ads are:
- Consumer-centric: they speak to your customers’ pain points, real-life concerns or goals
- Creative-centric: they have an interesting story or a memorable look and feel
- Non-intrusive: complement, don’t disrupt, your audience’s browsing experience and always give them control of their interaction with your banner ad
- Relevant: ensure your ads are always displaying alongside relevant content.
That’s why, even if you’re trying out new technologies for your next campaign, it’s important to ask: are you doing something meaningful with the expanded capabilities or are you just incorporating them into your campaigns for the ‘me-to’ factor? You can innovate away, with our blessing, but always do something interesting and relevant with the experiment.
Go to your banner ad metrics
Digital production agency
Most digital marketing teams start with their metrics and while the exercise can be illuminating, metrics don’t always capture the bigger picture or answer important questions like “Did we even build a good ad?” That’s why we don’t recommend getting hung up on metrics like impressions and click through rates, which aren’t always a good indicator of banner ad success. After you’ve run your campaign through the points above, take a look at the right numbers. Metrics like interaction rates, interaction time and video completion rates are important indicators of how your ad really performed. Many times, they’re better indicators and drivers of brand awareness than impressions and click through rates.
If you’re ready to take your next banner ad campaign or digital advertising efforts to the next level with a Digital Creative Production, drop us a line.
