What is Digital Advertising?

Digital Advertising, also known as Internet Advertising, is when businesses deliver promotional messages to consumers on the Internet through the web or email.

This includes video advertisements, banners, and commercials delivered through email, social media networks, messaging platforms, and online advertising on search engines, mobile apps, and websites.

Online advertising efforts are generally used with traditional advertising techniques like radio, television, newspapers, and magazines.

To help advertisers, there are several Internet-based advertising tools to research, create, manage, track, analyze, and improve digital advertising campaigns.

What can I achieve from Digital Advertising?

• Generate leads
• Increase Brand Awareness
• Get more traffic to your website
• Make more sales
• Get customers to spend more

What does digital media offer that TV advertising does not?

Digital Advertising is affordable, specific, and you get to see the results immediately. Due to this, digital advertising is being adopted by more and more SMBs (small-medium businesses).

1. Television ads are intrusive

The main disadvantage of TV advertisements is that they are intrusive. Google conducted a report with Ipsos that concluded that audiences that find active ways to avoid the commercials shown on TV because of their intrusive nature. In fact, only 45% of ads are watched completely on television.

2. Digital ads expand to the whole internet

The main advantage of online advertising is that it has a very wide net. When compared to any other form of advertising, online advertising is known to cover the largest group of audience. In fact, it has the potential to cover the entire world.

3. Television ads are expensive

Another advantage of digital advertising is that it is cost-effective. Online advertising doesn’t require such a heavy expenditure like TV advertising – or any other form of advertising in that case.

You can start Facebook Advertising for as less as $5 per day. Analyze, test, and streamline to maximize your ad ROI. As you grow, increase your bids and budget.

Based on your conversion rates and the bandwidth you have for the number of customers you can handle at any given time, you can scale your advertising efforts.

4. It is easier to measure the performance of Digital Ads

While TV advertising has some reporting and analytics capabilities, online ads can have almost every action tracked and analyzed. Digital advertising allows marketers to get as much information as they want about the ad – the number of times the ad was shown, the number of clicks the ad got, the audience it was shown to, how many took an action after coming to your website, etc.

You can use these analytics to find out how your target market reacts to different approaches, and optimize your digital ad campaigns much more efficiently than TV ad campaigns.

5. Digital ads are heavily targeted

By collecting and analyzing user data, you can reach exactly who you want to reach. You can run 7 different ads targeting 7 different types of customers, and each audience sees the ad are the most relevant to them.

Remember, higher relevance = more clicks = increased revenue.

6. You see immediate results of your Digital Ad campaigns

Unlike long-term strategies of branding, SEO, and content marketing that help you get your acquisition costs down while boosting revenues, digital advertising gives you instant ROI.

7. Digital Ads are flexible

In a matter of minutes, you can make changes to a specific ad campaign’s target audience, ad content and creative, or even adjust the entire marketing campaign.

How does Digital Advertising work?

In order to track and identify individuals, online advertisers use cookies, which are unique signatures of specific computers, to decide which ads to serve. Thanks to this, advertisers can pick the right audience, and consumers see relevant advertisements – it is a win-win for both!

Cookies can also track whether a user left a page without buying anything. This helps advertisers like you retarget the user later on different ad networks.

What is Behavioral Targeting?

As you use cookies to keep collecting data from multiple websites about a user’s online activity, you can combine this information to create a persona of the user and list their interests to deliver even more targeted messages. This is called behavioral targeting.

After you’ve picked a target audience, you need to pick the right ad network, format, and placement.

What is Programmatic Advertising?

The human mind is most efficient when it is not involved in doing mundane, repetitive tasks.

As an advertiser, you need to spend more of your time in planning more sophisticated, customized campaigns, and coming up with personalized retargeting strategies.

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of online advertising.

Acuity Ads

You can streamline your process and bring together all digital advertising efforts in one platform.

This involves:

• Making ad buying, ad placement, and ad optimization processes more efficient,
• Eliminating mundane activities, and
• Helping you go to market faster

There are machine-learning algorithms that analyze campaign inputs and user behavior, so real-time campaign optimizations can be made. This way only those audiences that are most likely to convert are identified and targeted.

Different data types and information is analyzed to increase the probability of a campaign’s success. Few of these data points include:

• Demographics,
• Geography and time,
• Interests,
• Behavior, and
• Type of device

After you’ve identified your target audience, and have found a network where said users often visit, it is time to make ad creatives for each platform.

What is Display Advertising?

Display Advertising is a form of online advertising in which brands use visuals like text, logos, animations, videos, photographs, or other graphics to show customized messages to a specific audience.

How can I make display ads?

Rocketium Campaign enables you to create both image and video ads in multiple formats for different ad networks.

What are the types of Digital Advertising?

1. Search Advertising

Over 50% of all website visits start in a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. A large percentage of these user searches are highly intentional, meaning that a lot of these searchers are ready to make a purchase.

They’re looking for a specific type of product or service as a solution to their problems – they’re researching options.

The pricing model for search advertisements is generally the CPC (cost per click) bidding system. This means you pay search engines for every click on your ad.

2. Social Media Advertising

Social media is big. Did you know that 31% of social media users say they use social media to discover new brands and shop?

• Facebook influences about 52% of all purchases including both online and brick-and-mortar.
• About 96% of people regularly discuss brands online as part of their social media experience.
• Since 2016, the number of SMBs that advertise on YouTube has increased by 200%
• LinkedIn’s visitor-to-lead ratio is 2.74%. This number is much higher than Facebook and Twitter.

Social media advertising includes boosting posts and showing display ads on different social media networks across different devices. Most social media advertising is based on extensive demographic, interests and behavioral data collected by search engines.

Check out this amazing resource put up by our friends over at Referral Rock on lead generation using social media.

3. Remarketing Advertising

The Internet can be distracting. Let’s say someone is on your website, ready to make a purchase. Then they get a text from their boss, they remember something they needed to do, or maybe their cat demands the food bowl be filled immediately – and they leave.

Unless they’re a loyal customer, they likely are not coming back. Remarketing is an effective way to bring these users back to your website by reminding them of your brand, products, and solutions.

Remarketing ads are known to increase click-through rates by 400%. It makes sense because you are gently reminding users what they wanted to do in the first place.

Display ads are perfect for retargeting. Videos, images, infographics, banners, GIFs – all of these visuals convey more information to viewers than text.

What metrics should I track for my Digital Ad campaigns?

1. Cost per lead

This metric is used to measure if your ad campaigns are cost-efficient. To calculate the cost per lead, you need to know the pricing model of different ad networks:

• CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions): This is is the bid you pay per 1,000 views (impressions) your ad gets.
• CPC (cost-per-click): This is the amount you pay every time a user clicks on your ad.
• Cost-per-view (CPV): This is used to measure how much you spend each time a user engages with your ad on YouTube or views it for at least 30 seconds.

2. Traffic-lead ratio

This is used to measure how many of your website visitors from ads convert to leads. Jot down what defines a lead, and track how many leads you’re getting from your visits.

3. Lead conversion rate

This metric tells you the number of leads that are converted into sales from your ad campaign. It is important because this metric ultimately tells you if your ad campaigns are effective.

4. Bounce rate

This is a measure of the number of visitors that arrive at your site from an ad and leave without navigating to any other page.

5. Average time spent on a page

This metric is used to measure the duration of time a visitor from an ad campaign spends on a page on your website.

6. Click-through rate (CTR)

This metric tells you how many users clicked on your website vs to how many users this ad was shown.

7. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

This is the total amount of capital it cost you to gain a new customer from an ad. It includes your ad spends, salaries of the personnel involved, and if you’re paying an agency to help you out, then the amount mentioned in their contract.

8. Lifetime value (LTV)

This is the amount of gross profit that is generated from a customer acquired from your ad campaign over the entire time they do business with your company.

Conclusion

When compared to television advertising, digital ads get better results, they’re easier to experiment with, and more importantly, they are considerably less expensive.

Due to this, several SMBs (small-medium businesses) have started experimenting with display advertising. Online ads also enable businesses to reacquire existing users and customers through remarketing campaigns.

As the next steps, check out Rocketium Campaign, an online platform with existing ad templates to enable you to create multiple ad creatives for different platforms at once!