Four Steps to Digital Display Advertising Process

Digital Display Advertising

Online display advertising made through the websites is called 'Digital Display Advertising'. It includes text, audio, video, and images. The purpose of display advertising is to enhance the awareness about brands through website advertisements.

Formally, Digital Display Advertising (DDA) is a form of Digital Marketing that shows ads on web pages to communicate relevant commercial messages to a specific and targeted audience based on their profiles. Usually, different ads follow you on the internet daily. As a digital marketer, you can produce online ads just as you create for an offline advertisement. These online ads called display banners contain a copy, logos, maps, images, and videos that will hook users as they browse.

Internet is the Best Medium to Display Commercial Ads to Target Audience. (Photo by Fancycrave1) 

The first online advertisement on World Wide Web was a banner displayed on October 27, 1994, on a commercial web-magazine Hot-wired. Display advertising is comparatively a new research and has gained significant importance in past several years, as the companies are gradually shifting their marketing budgets to digital channels. This dynamic development occurred due to the change in consumer’s behavior in terms of media usage and purchase behavior.

Advertising and Public Relations (PR) are the main tools in promotion function of marketing. The main goal of advertising is to influence the customers’ perception to persuade them to buy the advertiser’s product rather than competitor’s product. The main goal of Public Relations (PR) is to foster a positive image through good relations with stakeholders. The companies provide only information to the media or consumers to pick it up in their coverage of conversations and do not pay media to broadcast or print their ads.

The spending on display advertisement has significantly increased in past several years. The display advertising is growing fast and digital channels, in many developed countries, represent a major part in firms’ advertising activities. The main reason for increasing advertisements on digital channels as discussed below:

Changing Consumer Behavior

Changing consumer behavior is a major reason for an increase in digital advertising activities. Now, the buying patterns of consumers have changed and they spend more time on the internet to get information about the brands or directly purchase the products or services online. The internet has become a mass medium to reach the target customers or groups easily and quickly and the traditional media such as TV, Radio, Newspapers, and books have continuously declined.

Four Steps to Digital Display Advertising Process

Digital Display Advertising (DDA) process consists of four key stages:

Define. This stage helps you to identify and segment your customers on the demographic basis such as age, location, and interests. Then you will find the right publisher for your ads to display and set in line your advertising objectives with your overall goals.

Format. This stage introduces a wide range of creative ads, from which you can choose an appropriate Ad according to your customers’ perception and budget limits. Once you have selected ads of an appropriate format, then you will have to select the suitable media channel to publish your ads across these channels.

Configure. You can expand your campaign's potential by utilizing some steering tools like Google Display Planner and assigning KPIs to help you track these ads campaign on a constant basis. So you have to settle any bumps early before going online.

Analyze. At the final stage, you can measure and analyze the success of your advertising campaign using analytic tools. Then you can improve and optimize your ads prior to re-launching online. For this awesome activity, you must be familiar with necessary DDA terminology, procedures, and technology involved in the advertising campaign.

Key Terminologies used for Display Advertising

Ad Click	When a user clicks Ad after visiting the site
Ad Impression	The number of times, an ad is viewed without any interaction or clicked on
Ads Unique User	A user who looks an Ad for the first time
Cookie	A small text file or Internet tag that website stores on the user's Hard Drive to remember data about the user, for instance, search history
HTML	Hypertext Markup Language is the set of commands or codes used by web browsers to understand and display page content to users. In other words, it is the language that people use to develop their websites
Keyword	A term or phrase that triggers your Ads to appear and target the potential customers. You might use cookies as keywords in AdWords that will trigger Google algorithms to match that phrase
Page impression	The number of times that a user views a certain page within a website
Rich media	Interactive media (including text, graphics, animation, video, and audio) used to promote products and services on digital computer-based systems
Visit	The number of times that a user visits a website, each new visit occurs when there are at least 30 minutes between requests for new content

How Display Advertising Works

Create an Ad. Display advertising process starts when advertisers create ads after selecting a format keeping in view the budget constraints. For instance, if you want to advertise on ‘The New York Times Website’ you will bear more cost due to heavy traffic on this website.

Design an Ad and Select Publisher. Next, you have to design your ads and harmonize between the text and images. After getting your ad ready, you can choose a suitable publisher by using the Google tool “DoubleClick”. Most likely, Google Display Network is a popular publisher which includes a set of Google products and its partners such as YouTube etc.

Publish an Ad. Once you have selected your publisher and design your ad format, your publisher will place this Ad on most prolific websites based on your target audience, budget limits, selected platforms, and devices on which it should appear.

Serve an Ad. There are millions of Websites or Blogs which are the major stakeholder in Digital Display Advertising process that show your ads. These websites host your ad through their advertising banner spaces.

Click an Ad. Viewers are the ultimate source of traffic to see and click your ads that are designed in such a way to attract your audience. As a result of so much spent on advertisement, you want your audience to take an action such as buy, subscribe, or even fall in love with you.

Track an Ad. Once your audience interacts with your ad, it is your responsibility to monitor and refine the ads continuously. If your call to action is feeble, you should change it. If your ad is not achieving the goals, you should you should improve it.