The Future of Display Ads: Which of the 4 Types Will Dominate?

Since its inception in 1994, display advertising has evolved remarkably. AT&T internet designed and placed the first display banner ad on the official site of Wired. That ad’s Click-Through Rate (CTR) was a staggering 44%. Marketers, in large numbers, started to practice targeting by employing banner ads, which were gaining immense popularity back then. Read on to know what are the 4 types of display ads.

Besides a significant transformation in the visual aspect of display ads, the frequency at which these ads appear has increased to a great extent with time. At present, an individual based out of the USA sees, on average, 63 display advertisements every day. Certainly, the number is overwhelming for an internet user. However, businesses, as well as non-profitable organizations, opt for display ad campaigns to reap irrefutable benefits.

What are Display Ads?

In this era of visuals, catching the target audience’s attention quickly and effortlessly can be done through ads that consist of appealing images, graphics, text, links, and videos. Display ads are ideal for a business enterprise to promote its products or services.

Optimal use of business-relevant photos and videos helps make ads more visually engaging. Grabbing the eyeballs of potential customers is easier than ever because of display advertisements, once they are on Google Display Network, Meta Audience Network, etc.

In the display ad section on third-party sites, you will come across banner ads, text, and image ads. Captivating prospects and existing consumers is super-easy for a business organization these days if it knows the right way of making the most effective types of display ads.

Besides positively impacting your business bottom line, the possibility of increasing your brand visibility and awareness is more through display advertising. Count on it to convey the brand message to your business audience in a seamless manner.

The Motive behind Using Display Ads

Many businesses make use of display advertisements to engage and entertain prospective and current consumers. On the other hand, many profitable and charitable organizations use these ads to educate the target groups. There exist both static and dynamic forms of display ads. Choosing between these two forms depends entirely on the ad campaign goal.

The Onset of Targeting Relevant Audience

Digital marketers understood the importance and need of targeting the relevant audience a couple of decades back. Since then, display ads have been in use to target a set of users based on their demographics. Reaching out to your potential customers is not challenging at all nowadays when hosting sites prefer having display ads that are relatable to their visitors.

Immense Potential of Display Ad Campaigns

Marketers consider paid search ads an essential online marketing tool to help a business gain a competitive edge. It can help your business appear on top of the search results of Google and other popular search engines based on target keywords.

No doubt, search ads have high user intent, and their efficacy has been proven time and again. However, display ads have more potential compared to search ads when it comes to engaging the target customers. These ads stand out because of their wide reach and strong visual appeal.

Marketers prioritize conducting display ad campaigns more, especially for brand awareness and retargeting. Remember that display advertisements can be extremely relevant, appealing, and contextual for your business. So, including this cost-effective ad format in your digital marketing strategies is prudent.

Factors that Make Display Advertising Powerful

Growing Demand for Visually-Rich Ad Content: Without a doubt, the virtual world is full of visual content. No other ad formats except for display ads are capable of enchanting the target audience of a business so effortlessly. Creatively designed display advertising can help a business accentuate the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of its products and services.

Accomplishing your business objectives becomes a lot easier if you create an aesthetically pleasing display ad. Then, bring the same ad content in front of your prospects and current base of customers in an appropriate context and at the right time.

The Popularity of the Video Display Ad Format: The audio-visual ad format plays an instrumental role in facilitating brands to communicate their stories in a more engrossing manner. Besides fascinating images and graphics, the use of GIFs as well as videos has increased exponentially in display ads. Display ads featuring an engaging video hold the attention of viewers 3.2x more than non-display advertisements.

Smartphones Help Foster Ad Revenue Growth: Increased use of smartphones and tablets is contributing remarkably to the growth of display ads. Mobile-friendly display ads help increase the rate of sales conversion significantly. Mobile platforms are a boon to businesses because of a whopping growth of ad revenues.

What are the 4 Types of Display Ads?

Let’s now find out the four super powerful types of display ads that every business should prioritize to reap a host of advantages. Which display ad type will prove more effective depends on the functioning process and the kind of audience a business targets. Here are the most potent types of display ads.

Remarketing/Retargeting Ads

The majority of highly engaging display ads you come across these days online fall under the remarketing ad category. You can regard them as remarketing as well as retargeting ads. The prevalence of remarketing display ads is primarily owing to the popularity of the ad personalization trend.

Brands can impress and convince their target customers to buy from them through retargeting ads with ease. You can remind your potential and existing consumers of those products or services in which they have immense interest and offer them exactly what they require via retargeting ads. As per Accenture Interactive, nearly 91% of customers prefer staying loyal to brands that value their needs.

A remarketing or retargeting dynamic display ad campaign is a feasible way to augment online visibility and awareness. Creating and placing these ads is not difficult if you know the right steps to take.

Start with inserting a small code section onto your site, gathering valuable data about the browsing behavior of your site visitors. It can easily collect information pertinent to when visitors navigate to a particular product page or category. Using the helpful info will enable you to create a list of types of customers and determine the appropriate ad messages for each of them.

Contextually-Targeted Ads

Many brands place targeted display advertisements on a third-party website in a contextual manner rather than displaying ads based on the user profiles of the potential audience. You must prioritize certain things to run contextually targeted ad campaigns.

Here’s what you need to consider.

• Ad-relevant keywords and topic
• Preferred location and language
• The overarching theme of the host website
• The site visitors’ recent browsing histories

The most popular search engine, Google, can let you select from a compiled list of relevant and intriguing topics. It is also instrumental in matching your display ads to relatable pages on the Google Display Network. You can perform the topic selection or targeting on your own so that you are certain about the exclusion of outdated, irrelevant, or substandard topics.

Personalized Display Ads

You have to take every measure possible to ensure that you provide an improved user experience through display ads. Many expert marketers regard remarketing as a subsection of personalized ads. The effectiveness of these ads is more evident while segmenting your target audience.

Targeting potential customers through personal ads is hassle-free. These effective ads consider your target audience demographics and their likes or interests. You can tailor your promotional message once you know your target audience and let each of them enjoy the personalized experience that you create.

While recommending a product to a potential customer, make sure the personal touch does not go missing. Personalized ads increase the chances of sales conversions, more profits, and ROI, besides augmenting user experience. This type of display advertising takes good note of how a visitor interacts with your website.

Cardinal Types of Personalized Ads

Personalized display ads are of four primary types. The incorporation of user preferences and behavior is the common factor instead of brand interaction.

• Affinity Communities: Your ads will appear in front of those customers who have the most interest in a business similar to yours and your industry. Remember that the group this kind of personalized ad targets is quite broad. However, a huge number of people will come across your ads, which can prove immensely beneficial for your business.
• Custom Affinity Groups: Focusing on smaller and custom affinity groups allows you to be more particular about certain sets of interests or preferences you wish to target. Your emphasis on the specific interests of groups after narrowing prevents you from reaching larger audiences. However, it is just the perfect kind of personalized ad if targeting a niche audience is what matters to you.
• Similar Audience Ads: You can target those with interest or facets similar to your site’s visitors or remarketing audience through these ads. Your brand’s reach to qualified potential customers will increase if you opt for similar audience ads. In addition, these ads can generate more clicks and sales conversions. Google can easily identify the common characteristics between the one on the remarketing list and the new prospects.

Aside from the aforementioned ones, another personalized ad type helps target customers searching for items or services relevant to your business. Investing in custom intent and in-market display advertising helps target those who are more likely to become your customers.

Website Placement Targeted Ads

Opt for website-placed ads if you are more interested in hand-picking the third-party sites that will display your ads. You have the option to choose the whole website or specific pages within that site. One distinct advantage this type of display ad ensures is that Google picks up pages most relevant to your business audience once you select a website. The combination of contextually targeted ads and site placement targeting is possible when you stick with this approach.

So, now you know what are the 4 types of display ads and how effective they can be for a business if you leverage each of them correctly and timely.

What to Prioritize More for a Better Future of Display Advertising?

The prime objective of any advertising is to establish a robust connection between a business and its customers. As a brand, you need to focus on a couple of crucial things to retain your customers and expand the base – maintaining relevance and timely meeting customer requirements. It’s proven multiple times that most consumers (over 80%) expect brands to know them well, besides having a clear knowledge of the suitable time to approach them.

Gaining insights into customer behavior and preferences is no more an impossible thing for experienced marketers. Making the customer journey more meaningful needs businesses to devise result-driven marketing strategies. It is very much possible as you have so much valuable data at your disposal. Targeting every unique customer requires you to create the right, relevant message, use appropriate marketing channels and post ads at the right moments.

Personalization Must Be a Priority

Communicating seamlessly with a wider audience base and connecting with each customer must be a brand’s priority. Achieving the same is possible only when you focus more on personalization. Categorize users by taking numerous things into consideration before targeting each segment of users with creative, interesting, and relevant ads. Doing so will help your brand connect with your potential consumers at a personal level successfully.

Use Different Languages for Seamless Communication

You have to agree that aside from English, it is paramount to create ad content using different other languages. Your potential audience will value your brand more if you use languages they are more comfortable with, meaning easier to understand. In this way, you can stand apart from the competition, and your prospects and current users will consume your content more.

Creatively designed display advertising in vernacular languages can help convey your brand message with ease. Moreover, such ads can help you reach a larger audience and convert most of them into loyal consumers. Therefore, you must not avoid having an effective multilingual display ad strategy.

Importance of A/B Testing

You have the option to keep testing and display creativity without investing substantial time, money, and effort. So, make the most of it if you want to gain an advantage over your competitors. When you test variations, it becomes much easier to understand which one will help you better communicate and improve ROI.

You can test and optimize every key element of your display ad content before moving forward with the most suitable one. Finalizing the better ad variant won’t be difficult as you will have the data that indicates customer reaction to each of the variations. Over 60% of major companies strongly believe that A/B testing helps optimize conversion rate to a significant extent.

Another thing that you must not forget is you need the right kind of messaging when creating a display ad campaign to have the desired impact. Now that you know what are the 4 types of display ads, taking the correct steps won’t be difficult for you any longer. Display ads can certainly help you reach out to your target audience and convert them into buying customers if you do the needful with utmost honesty.