Having trouble with online advertising? Do any of these statements sound familiar?

• “I can’t make my display advertising work…”
• “I am finding it hard to come up with the right creative message…”
• “My banner click-through rates are weak…”

If you have ever carried out any display banner advertising, you know that display offers one of the lowest click-through and conversion rates of any online channel.

As a result marketers predominantly use this channel to boost brand presence when it could be embraced for its direct response attributes.

Using Analytics to Develop Smart Creative

It’s not hard to develop creative that is so outrageous that everyone wants to click – just get your creative agency to develop banners that read “Click here and receive $5,000!” and see the clicks flood in.

However, I’m pretty sure that while you’ll generate a boost in traffic, 99% of this traffic will not add any serious value to your business.

So how do you increase traffic without compromising quality? Engage focus groups to analyse your products and services? Pay thousands of dollars to research houses to supply in-depth market intelligence?

In fact, there’s an easier, cheaper solution: Use search data to draft your ads.

Search engines and analytics packages are loaded with valuable data that can be used for display advertisements. These include Keywords, Search Volumes, Click Volumes and Conversion Data.

There is a lot of information here. You just need to study this data to find the opportunities.

Here are two tactics that I recommend trialling that use search data to help drive display advertising.

Approach 1: Use Paid Search data

If you are running any Paid Search (SEM) activity, then I recommend extracting a report of the best performing Text Ads from your program. Ensure you capture their corresponding Click-through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CR) performances.

The data available here can be, at the very least, just as valuable as any other market research that can be purchased, and a lot less expensive too.

The data tells you the story of how consumers are finding, interacting and converting on your site. Assuming that your Adwords and Analytics are implemented correctly, pay per click advertising can provide compelling data.

So why not use this to build your display creative as well?

1. Get your team to do an extract of the Text Ads within your Google Adwords campaigns
2. Ensure the report contains “Text Ads”, “Text Ad Impressions”, “Text Ad Keyword Click-through Rates”, “Text Ad Conversion Rates”
3. Sort initially by Conversion Rates – highest to lowest
4. Add a 2nd sort by Click-through Rates – highest to lowest

After cross-referencing Click-through and Conversion Rate, you can assess the data and determine the best performing Text Ad based on driving the highest number of clicks and conversions.

Example

Using this intelligence you now have a blueprint of what keywords and Ad copy should be adopted in your banner creative. In this example, it’s easy to see which key words performed strongly and, therefore, were incorporated into banner ads.

Approach 2: Use Google’s Keyword Tool

1. Go to Google Keyword Tool and select your region (in this example, Australia)
2. Start typing in a wide selection of keywords that relate to your products or services. Google will make further suggestions of keywords you can use; select where appropriate.
3. Once you have a good selection of keywords, set the filtering to to ensure you only capture exact searches (no phrase variations)
4. Sort by local search volume from the previous month.

Now take the keyword with the highest search volume and integrate it into your banner creative.

For example, look at the keyword “Property Investment”. This keyword had approximately 175% more user searches in July 2010 than the next highest searched term, “Property Investing”.

By using the term “Property Investment” in your marketing you have taken an existing insight and preempted the user’s future search action. Google Keyword Tool can give you the most popular phrasing that consumers are using. Combine its use with an offer and this ad becomes highly targeted and relevant.

Example

Liaise with your creative agency (- eg. Market United – ) to develop a simple animated banner which looks and feels like a search text box. Have the animation feature a blinking cursor in the text box, then typing in the keyword identified in your initial research, before clicking on the “Search” button.

Follow up with an offer to prompt a user action.

Summary

As can bee seen, strong creative messaging can be generated by using data from Google’s Keyword Tool or your own PPC account data. Gather insights, understand your target audience, how they interact and convert with your site. Once you have this intelligence then the creative almost writes itself.

Please note that the above recommendations should only been seen as a preliminary step to developing your creative concept. If you are already running some display activity, then at the very least you should use best practice marketing techniques and TEST these concepts against your current display activity.

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We’d like to suggest that online marketing is more effective and generates sales at a better ROI than billboard advertising.

Let’s assume a billboard costs $3,500 for a month. How many visitors to your store would you expect? And how many of these visitors (if any) would you expect to buy your product? How will you measure success?

Online, the calculation becomes pretty simple. $3,500 will get you around 3,000 visitors (depending on industry) and if we assume a 1% conversion rate that’s 30 sales. Fully tracked through to revenue. End of story.

Billboards can create awareness about a brand but cannot be tracked and measured effectively like online marketing can be. Sure, a billboard may have a certain amount of “views” per day: For example a typical billboard on Ellerslie Panmure Highway has 18,714 “views” / day (OGGI, 2010). But it’s difficult to measure how many people actually look at the billboard and process the message. Furthermore, how many people actually really end up purchasing a product as a result..?

Consumer Behaviour Has Changed

The way we see it, traditional advertising such as billboard advertising is not an effective form of advertising in today’s society as it does not create the same impact with consumers it did 20 years ago.

Consumer behaviour has changed dramatically and different forms of advertising such as online marketing have more impact on consumers in contrast to traditional forms such as billboards.

Today information is easily accessible, which makes consumers very aware and knowledgeable of products and services as information is right at their fingertips.  Consumers today spend large amounts of time surfing the internet, researching product information and engaging in social media which leads them to be more aware of what is in the market.

One of the reasons why online advertising is  more powerful than billboards is its ability to engage and build relationships with consumers, as well as effectively targeting specific consumers. Billboards, on the other hand, can only target a diverse group who may (or may not) be interested in the advertised product.

Engaging and building relationships with consumers is important as this leads the consumer to want to purchase the product, and it also builds trust with the brand which leads to customer loyalty. This is every brand’s end goal as it leads to repeat purchases.

If you are considering billboard advertising but haven’t yet got your online marketing sorted, talk to us. We are experts in search engine optimisation and performance advertising and believe that we can make a cost-effective difference to your business.

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Number One Shoes strives to provide their customers with “the right shoes at the best price and a huge range – and something new each week!” Fashion is their passion and their huge range caters for all desires, tastes and needs.

Since acquiring the Shubar chain in 2001, Number One Shoes has developed a format and offering unique to the local specialist New Zealand footwear market, doubling the average size of their stores to nearly 1,000m2 and extending locations nationwide to offer an average of 4,000 lines and colours.

One key aspect of any digital strategy is to focus on new customer acquisitions. The Number One Shoes VIP Club allows customers to hear about special offers, the latest trends and new season footwear. Growing this database provides Number One Shoes with an important, cost-effective sales channel.

First Rate was tasked to utilise any and all online channels to aggressively grow Number One Shoes’ VIP email database. Download the Performance Marketing Case Study to learn more!

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