How to Get Your Online Ads in Front of The Right Audience
Digital advertising allows your messaging to be targeted at engaged prospects, and reaching the largest audience doesn’t always mean reaching the ideal audience for your message and your products.
Getting your message in front of prospective customers is the baseline goal of all advertising, but even with static display ads the true target is to move your prospects to action.
When it comes to print display ads, the goals are generally branding and product awareness. There’s simply not much time and room for anything more. Whether it’s a billboard along the highway, a page in a magazine or a banner on a website, display ads are positioned to interrupt something your audience is engaged in. You have just a moment to catch a prospect’s attention.
Still, when everything goes as planned, you not only grab a moment of your prospect’s time, you inspire them with your message and drive them to a specific action. Most people who encounter your ad will not engage, and even a majority of those who acknowledge your branding and product awareness messages will stop short of responding to your call to action. However, when you place your ads in the path of people predisposed to engage with your message, you increase the chances of achieving every part of your goals for that campaign.
Online Advantages
B2B print advertising is a viable way to put your message in the path of a sizeable audience, but measuring how many people actually open those publications is difficult at best, and truly tracking the reach and impact of print remains a challenge.
With online advertising the rules, and the rewards, are different. Online ads can be targeted at specific audiences based on metrics of the sites where the ads are placed. Just like in print, they can be placed next to related content, but in the online realm, they can also be set up to display to a specific audience based a web user’s behavior. Sure online ads still serve as billboards hoping to grab a few moments of attention in order to deliver your message, but with their ability to instantly connect prospects with more detailed information on a landing page, they provide the opportunity for a direct and immediate engagement.
Metrics are the other huge advantage to online display ads. Everything online is tracked, and every ad placed on can be measured. These measurements can tell you exactly how many people had an opportunity to receive your message and how many of those people took the time to click your call to action. Metrics can be used to test and refine messaging, to improve your ad campaigns, and to quickly adapt to the real world response.
Aiming at the Right Targets
With so much information now available, metrics for online ads aren’t just for performance evaluation and follow-up. Data from the sites where you place your ads can tell you if you’re putting your advertising in front of the most receptive audience. Most websites know their audiences in great detail. They know how many people view certain types of content, when they view that content and for how long. Most importantly, they know who is clicking on the ads on the site, and what types of ads are most effective for different audiences.
The best part about this medium for your advertising is that it is not hard to find the audiences that are most interested in your products and thus receptive to your messaging. Online content is generally consumed by choice, and this means the audience’s reasons for consuming content are just as important as the content they’re consuming.
Someone clicking a social media link to a cleverly titled list is likely looking for a momentary distraction. On the other hand, someone who visits a website after using a search engine to research a topic related to your product is most likely interested in detailed information on products just like yours. That is the person most likely to engage with your ad.
At Dentalcompare, we see higher than average display ad success because a majority of the audience is made up of people researching products for their dental practices. More that 3/4s of site visitors enter following a search, and more than 2/3s of the pages they view are in the Dentalcompare Product Directory. While the average clickthrough rate of display ads across the web is around 0.06%, Dentalcompare’s sitewide rate is 0.34%. Those rates approach 1% when the ads are sponsoring a specific category within the Product Directory. This makes perfect sense because people viewing a specific category are already searching for that type of product, so an ad promoting such a product is less of an interruption and more a natural part of their search.
Finding the Fit for your Online Ads
When looking for the right place to position your online display ads it’s important to consider both audience size, and audience intent. Getting your ads on the site with the highest traffic totals isn’t always the way to go. If that audience is there for the wrong reasons, your ads will be nothing more than digital billboards in periphery.
It’s important to find the balance of placing your ads in front of the largest possible audience that is already showing interest in what you are advertising. Work with ad networks and websites that let you get your ads in front of visitors who self-select to view the content related to your ads. This way you’ll be reaching your target customers as effectively as possible.
The total number of people who see your ad might be smaller, but when planned correctly, the number of people who respond to your call to action should increase. Because these ads are digital and trackable, you’ll quickly be able to see what sites, messages and ad styles work best. From there it’s a matter of testing and fine-tuning your messaging to increase ad performance, and following up to turn your pool of engaged prospects into happy customers.