2011 Media Planning
February 23, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Believe it or not a great deal of digital advertising agencies are already undertaking their 2011 Media Planning for their clients. The RFPs from agencies coming in right now are mostly for companies planning media from July 2010 through to June 2011 activity. This is very different from media planning which we experienced last year with most planning taking place either a couple of days from going live or at a maximum of 8 weeks in advance.
Interestingly most companies have increased their budgets for 2011 Media Planning by approximately 2 to 2 and half times from that in 2009/2010. Many of the companies we deal directly with in the food, wine, tourism and kitchen appliance industries are all looking at online as a cost effective channel to achieve growth in sales.
Already apparent across 2011 media planning that we’ve seen is the shift from the performance based metric of just click through rate (CTR) over to the broader brand based metric of engagement rate. The move to engagement rates suggests that a heavy emphasis will be placed on creative development in 2011, using high visibility units such as video. This is very different from the past where most campaigns booked consisted of only regular display units such as 728×90, 300×250 and 160×600. Its seems that agencies are planning to use creative such as pre roll video, widgets, long term integration, dynamic ads, expandable units, interstitials, background skins and social networking elements all which can be executed through Gourmet Ads.
For companies in the Food and Wine space, Gourmet Ads is a natural fit, but some of the media planning we’ve seen in 2011 is for companies outside of this space. Advertising agencies have recognised the value of our female grocery buying audience which has led to RFPs in the tourism, financial, automotive spaces indicating that many brand advertisers are seeking quality inventory out of their “safe” advertising places that they used in 2009 and Q1 2010.
Gourmet Ads can help you or your advertising agency develop your 12 month plan to target your audience online throughout the year. By booking media in advance (either 6 month or 12 months) allows us to offer significant discounts on CPM rates and bonus impressions increasing your return on investment.
To have Gourmet Ads help with your 2011 media planning, please Request for Proposal from us or to learn more about Gourmet Ads, download a copy of our media kit.
Dynamic Ads
February 19, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · 1 Comment
Imagine being able to control and change the entire content, messaging or call to action of a display campaign in just a few minutes. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that fresh creative as part of a campaign significantly increases click through and engagement rates.
Dynamic ads are generally created in Flash or HTML and instead of the content being written into the files, the content is sourced from a server live or cached. The content could be fed into the ad by a RSS feed or there are some companies specializing in creating and developing dynamic ads.
Developing a creative execution paired together with consumer behaviour in the form of cookies could significantly increase sales. For example Amazon has been using dynamic ads for years, integrating products you’ve looked at into their ad units. Adding in both to behavioural data, geotargeting data could also be applied to the add.
Dynamic Ads sound great but what are some practical uses or examples?
- Supermarkets could publish today’s special together with a product photo
- ecommerce sites could publish today’s product of the day
- Airlines and hotels could publish a hot vacation deal or cheap flight of the day
- Your brands Twitter conversation (as above)
- Sponsors of sports games like Superbowl or Football World Cup could publish the score in real time
- TV stations could publish what’s on tonight’s line up
- News companies could publish the current headlines
- Restaurant chains could advertise todays specials
As you can see the ideas are endless and are really only limited by your imagination. The team at Gourmet Ads can help develop dynamic ad concepts to reality and deliver them to our audience of highly engaged grocery buyers.
For more information about Dynamic Ads or Gourmet Ads, Download our Media Kit or Request a Proposal from our team.
Post Impression Tracking
February 4, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Most people think that a click (measured as the click through rate or CTR) is the only trackable metric when running a display advertising campaign. However comScore Brand Metrix data indicates that many website visitors respond to ads by going directly to the advertiser’s site — either through a brand search or by entering a web address — without clicking the ad itself. Either way the individual arrives on your site because they were influenced by seeing your ad campaign running, which is why it’s important to mention the website within your ad creative.
Unlike many other networks, all campaigns running on the Gourmet Ads network can track the overall ad effectiveness, via post impression tracking (also known as view-through tracking).
With post-impression tracking, advertisers can tie ad impressions to conversion events on the advertisers’ sites, up to 30 days after the original ad view.
Digging deeper, Post-impression tracking enables us to;
- Tie ad impressions to later purchases, searches, or sign ups on the advertiser’s site, for deeper insight into customer behavior and future campaign optimization
- Customize the tracking timeframe from just a few hours to up to 30 days
- Track up to four events per campaign and collect up to eight attributes (such as shopping cart value or SKUs purchased) for each conversion event
- Measure advertisers’ cost per conversion by campaign
- Easily manage implementation and reporting via the Adify console
Setting up post impression tracking is relatively easy. After you’ve booked the campaign and it’s been trafficked, we’ll provide javascript tags which you insert into the footer of your site. Our trafficking team will do some testing, then as soon as your campaign goes live your reports will be available.
So if you’re interested in measuring ad effectiveness for your next campaign, then be sure to request post impression tracking when booking your campaign with us. For more information, download our media kit or you can request a proposal and we’ll send through a full digital media plan for your consideration.
Increasing Click Through Rates
December 1, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Gourmet Ads focuses on providing advertisers the best platform for their advertising campaign. We do this by only editorially selecting sites we feel will perform. But ultimately for brand advertisers they gauge success by the engagement rate of the campaign, while direct response advertisers gauge success on the click through rate or CTR of the campaign.
So from an advertiser perspective what can be done to increase the click through rate on campaigns? What do you have to do for your campaign to out perform? Well there are a number of tasks that can be undertake to significantly increase your click-through-rate.
Advertising Creative
Often disregarded by advertisers if you’re creative isn’t professionally designed with clear call to actions and messaging its hard to simply expect people to click on your ads. Check out a recent blog we wrote about Creative Advertising which goes through some of the necessary things to think about when designing your creative.
Media Buying in Relevant Content / Channels
Well if you’re reading this you’re obviously aware that Gourmet Ads is a food and wine advertising network. As such campaigns with a food or wine focus or targeted at audiences of food and wine sites perform exceptionally well. Travel, Finance and Automotive all perform very well on the Gourmet Ads network (see Automotive Advertising). So the key here is that you should book media for your campaign on networks where the content is related to the product you’re advertising.
Frequency Capping
You’ve probably seen on media plans things like 1/48 or 5/24 well these are indicators for media planners on how many impressions to display per day per user. 1/48 meant the user will see 1 impression every 2 two days, while 5/24 means 5 impressions per day. 1/48 is commonly used for trafficking an interstitial or over the page creative, while 5/24 is for regular display. Frequency Capping helps increase your click thought rate because a user isn’t bombarded by your ads.
Multiple Creative
Say you have 5/24 frequency capping on your campaign, then to increase the click through rate one strategy could be to have 5 different ads within your media campaign. That way users are not seeing the same ad but fresh ads during their site visit. This increases the chance of them clicking on the ads and driving up the click through rate for the campaign.
Use a Price and Call to Action in Your Ads
This may seem obvious, but if you don’t ask users to do something then they probably won’t do it. So if you want people to click on ad, then you’d be best to have a strong call to action in the messaging asking them to do so. Some advertising creative has fixed part of the advert for messaging like “Click for more info” with the aim of increasing the click through rate.
Use Geo Targeting
There’s no point advertising your product or service to a country or state that your advertising isn’t relevant to. So Gourmet Ads insists on placing some sort of geo targeting restrictions on campaigns to ensure that users clicking on your ad are likely to be customers. By using geo targeting the click through rate will also be higher because the messaging is relevant, thus increasing the amount of clicks for your campaign.
Use time Day Part Targeting
Most campaigns run on Gourmet Ads are either food or wine campaigns, and as such they are aimed at times and days of the week when it’s appropriate to target consumers. For example when advertising food products between 9am to 10pm each day, they have a higher click through rate compared to if they were trafficked over a 24 hour period. Conversely wine products advertised Wednesday to Sunday have a higher click through rate compared to running them 7 days a week.
Roadblock Advertising
Ideally used for key days like Black Friday or Memorial Day, Roadblock advertising can increase the click through rate because every single impression for that day is for your campaign. When running your advertising campaign across a network such as Gourmet Ads, roadblock advertising provides a wide reaching media buy with similar metrics to those of TV media buy.
Campaign Optimization
One of the ways we as network operators can help increase your click through rate for the campaign is to run optimization on the campaign. We can filter out all the ad units which are not performing at the desired click though rate and removing them from the buy instantly.
If you’d like to learn more about the opportunities on the Gourmet Ads network, download our media kit or request a proposal for your next campaign.
Creative Advertising
November 24, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
At Gourmet Ads, we’re loading up and sending advertising campaigns live everyday. One of the most common things we see is poorly designed advertising creative. What I mean is that it’s either poorly designed from a creative perspective or the messaging isn’t that clear and straight to the point. Both of which can have a negative effect on the ultimate performance of a campaign.
It’s unfortunate but sometimes advertising agencies and food companies spend more time on researching where they are going to buy media placements, than the advertising creative. In fact many of the advertising agencies we deal with only perform the media planning and buying part of the campaign after another agency has done the creative. At the end of the day a well designed advertisement with clear messaging will perform in a closely related environment, but what we know is, bad creative won’t perform.
So here are some things to think about from a creative aspect next time your running a food advertising campaign;
Have your advertising designed by a professional
Many small and medium sized businesses try and design their own ads in Photoshop or attempt to use Flash. But having your ads designed by a professional will make a huge difference and a set of three ads isn’t expensive. We often help agencies who are on limited budgets get their creative done. If you need creative designed for your next campaign, please contact us and we’ll provide a quote.
Have a Creative Advertising Brief
Advertising agencies specialise in developing the messaging, story board and design and present this as a complete Creative Advertising Brief. But if you don’t have an agency, you’ll need to develop these for the design team to use. Any professional creative design team will require a brief in order to move forward. If you need a Creative Advertising Brief template, just contact us and we’ll send you our template.
Messaging including Call to Actions
One of the most important aspects with advertising creative is to have a clear message with calls to action. Tell the audience what they need to do in order to engage (eg “Click Here” or “Roll Over for Coupon”) with the advertising. If your goal is to have a high click through rate (CTR) then say click here. Don’t just expect the audience to know how to engage. Before heading to design, make sure you test the messaging with your target audience. This can help re-doing your creative or having terrible campaign reports.
Size limits on creative
It’s important to note that the smaller the file size the quicker the ad will load on the audience’s website. At Gourmet Ads we can take creative up to 100k in size; however we recommend keeping the file size down to 40k-50k which will ensure that it loads fast.
Finally, Gourmet Ads works with a design team who used to work on US President Barak Obama’s online campaign as well as automotive and entertainment clients. I’m constantly surprised by the output from this team together with the creative being design on time and on budget. No surprises.
If you need creative designed for your next campaign, please contact us and we’ll provide a quote.
300 x 250 – The Top Performer
July 8, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Sample 300 x 250 Advertisement
Some call it the Island Ad, others call it the MREC or Medium Rectangle. Whatever you actually call it, the 300 x 250 Ad Unit tends to be the best performing ad unit across the Gourmet Ads network. When I refer to performer, this is in relation to the click through rate, post click tracking and post impressions tracking for that ad unit. Talking just clicks, we generally see that the 300 x 250 has a click rate 20%-30% higher than other ad units on a page.
So why does the 300 x 250 outperform? This is probably due to its size which helps a great deal as well as how its positioned on a page. Usually they are located in the top right hand side (above the fold) or within the content of the page allowing it stand out when people are reading the text on the page.
Another reason why the 300 x 250 outperforms is that this ad unit is perfect for rich media, especially video content. Gourmet Ads is seeing more and more advertisers running video in the ad unit for either tv commercials or movie trailers. Purely because of its dimensions, video looks great in the 300 x 350 ad unit. Video was designed to be there.
Becoming more and more popular with advertisers is the expandable ad units. We’ve run expandable 300 x 250 ads allowing recipes and other sorts of content to be published in an ad unit. This allows users to engage with the advertiser content on the page. Here we can tracks expands and other interactions providing a different sort of metrics from just the usually click through rate or CTR.
So what are the takeaways from this blog? That you still should continue to provide all ad units for a campaign and if possible use rich media and video. From the outset of a campaign, I would allocate a higher budget into the 300 x 250 space. However ever campaign is different and if an ad unit isn’t performing as well as another ad unit, we’ll recommend moving it to another unit. But keep in mind your campaign might get great results from the 160 x 600. You never know till you run it.
Retargeting Strategy
June 30, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
We recently wrote a blog on Search Retargeting and how you use the search engines to find relevant users for your products then using display advertising retarget them with highly related advertising. Since the Search Retargeting blog, we’ve had a great deal of enquiry asking about more generalised Retargeting Strategies to help generate a high return on investment for your online campaigns.
If you’re selling products online, the most important thing is for you to develop some sort of Retargeting Strategy. The sooner you start serving cookies, the sooner you can start retargeting and generating sales.
So first off what is retargeting?
Retargeting is tactic used by online advertisers who target previous website visitors and serve them an advertisement encouraging them to revisit the site and complete a purchase. The advertisements which get served could be via a roadblock or sequential targeting and can offer the user a range of advertising messages in order to complete the sale. This is done by dropping a cookie on the user’s machine depending on behaviour targeting criteria which we’ll go into detail further.
Why would I want to use retargeting?
There is no doubt that consumers do a great deal of research online before making a purchase and for products with long purchasing cycles retargeting is a strategy to keep your brand or website top of mind with your target audience. Often when a user starts off researching a product to buy they will visit a wide range of sites looking for information on the product. At this time if you drop a cookie with some information on their behaviour you can target this later in the purchasing cycle.
Who do you target?
There are few options to consider.
- Everyone – you should begin immediately gathering data on who visits your site, particularly if you’re a smaller or niche ecommerce site. You can target these users with branding campaigns in the future.
- People who look at particular products. I’d personally mark any user that looks at a high margin product. It’s no good marking low margin products because you’ll eliminate the margin with the advertising cost. Just stick to high margin products. These sorts of people can be targeted with product specific advertising, drawing them back to the site in the future.
- People that don’t complete the shopping cart. These types of people are obviously ready to buy, but there was something in the way that stopped the transaction. It’s usually either comes down to price or shipping costs. If you can eliminate an obstacle and bring people back to complete their shopping cart with 20% off your order if you buy today or free shipping then your conversion rate increases and you get the sale.
- People that signup for a member or newsletter but don’t purchase. They are obviously interested in your products, but are not ready to buy. Could these people benefit from offering them a free catalogue or a discount coupon in order to buy?
What are some of the offers or messaging I could retarget my audience with?
Anything really, the ideas are endless. The key is running different retargeting creative which appeals to that audience demographic. Some ideas on retargeting campaigns could include;
- 24 hour sale (everything reduced)
- Discount Code or Coupon Code
- Specific discount on a particular product
- Become a member and get a catalogue or white paper
- Signup to the Newsletter
Where would the Retargeting Campaign run?
The campaign would be run back in the Gourmet Ads network traffic pool. Our systems will start locating your retargeting cookies the moment they leave your site. So if a user has had a cookie dropped on your site, then visits a site within our network, they’ll see retargeting campaigns straight away.
With a proper retargeting strategy, you can expose that consumer to specific ads as they surf and shop outside the walls of your site. For products with a longer purchase cycle, retargeting leverages sequential advertising to reinforce your message as the consumer goes through the research and consideration process prior to completing a purchase.
To learn more about developing a Retargeting Strategy for your site or ecommerce store, contact us for more information and we’ll prepare a proposal for your consideration.
Not Just Clicks
June 5, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Earlier this week I stumbled over a study from iProspect.com which looked at the behavior of US internet users when visiting a website supported by advertising. The study surveyed Internet users to find out what actions they took when viewing a display ad on an ad-supported Website, 31% said they clicked on the ad.
In addition, 27% reported that they did an online search for the product, brand or company; something that we’ve believed for sometime. We’ve seen a tonne of research indicating this and I think we’ll write a dedicated blog about it in the future.
21% typed the company Web address in their browser. This was also rather obvious to us and is definitely the reason why you should have a naturally sounding domain name like www.companyname.com or www.brandname.com even if you simply redirect it back through to the product page on the company website. You could be missing out on traffic that’s looking for you. Make it easier!
Finally, and I cant really understand why, but 9% sought additional information using social media tools. It could be that the’ve looked at the product website and are looking for reviews, comments etc ?
So the conclusion of the study is that a click is only one measure of a display ad’s effectiveness. The by line of the report was “Display ads do more than look pretty” and as you can see this is very much the case. In order to measure the total value of a campaign it means you now need to be measuring all the online assets of your company or brand. For website metrics, you could use something like Google Analytics or Webtrends for visitors, tracking searches and domain name typing. Then on the social side you’ll need a tool to measure social side.
Source : www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007090
Beyond the Banner
June 3, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · 1 Comment
Nearly every RFP (request for proposal) we’ve seen for digital advertising this year has mentioned the phrase “Beyond the Banner” or some sort of related comment like “we’re looking for something further than just regular display advertising”. Why? Because advertisers (and advertising agencies) know that these sorts of campaigns build branding and driving purchase intent.
Recent increases in bandwidth as well as technology developments in Flash and Silverlight have meant that there is no excuse for not using rich media as a standard inclusion for the every campaign. Now advertisers can use creative assets such as streaming video to get the message across. All of a sudden internet looks far more attractive than compared to TV. For the first time advertisers can run a video advertisement (for longer than 30 seconds) like that would have on TV and then engage with them right then and there. Have them go to your website, purchase a product, signup for a newsletter, follow them on Twitter.
So what options does Gourmet Ads typically include on a digital media plan for clients? Each and every digital media plan is different. We’ll take a look at the target audience, how they want to communicate with the client and the ultimate aim for the campaign. But broadly these are some for the Beyond the Banner activity we would recommend to a client;
- Over the Page
- Site Sponsorship
- Viral Video Campaign
- Expanding video ad units
- Push Down Expandables
Gourmet Ads isn’t a creative house, but providing you can supply us with your existing creative (even offline creative) we will have them redeveloped into rich media for your Beyond the Banner campaign. We work with leading developers in the US to develop all the assets for your campaign.
Finally, apart from the Beyond the Banner elements, we always include regular display on our digital media plans. ie 728 x 90 (leaderboard), 300 x250 (MREC or Island) and 160 x600 (skyscrapers). This is because as good as the rich media beyond the banner activity is, the display ads which are closely surrounding them or viewed after the fact get the clicks. Think of beyond the banner as informing and entertaining them and display which gains the engagement and fulfillment.
So if you’re looking to reach a unique audience of food and wine consumers using Beyond the Banner creative or just want to learn more about what can be done online, then download our media kit or request a proposal from our team.
Campaign Optimization
May 2, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
The Gourmet Ads network advertising server (Adify) consistently through out the campaign auto optimizes the ad serving ensuring sites which are best performing for a campaign receive a higher percentage of ads compared to sites that are not performing as well. Depending on the campaign this can sometimes not be enough for advertisers to see results.
Over and above our auto optimization, Gourmet Ads can run weekly manual campaign optimization, removing ad units which are poorly performing, thus improving the overall performance of the campaign increasing the return on investment. Each site and advertising campaign is different. On occasions ads located within content outperforms ads which are at the top of the page. Sometimes we’ll remove ads which are not performing and shift the budget to the creative that does work.
There isn’t a set formula for what works and what doesn’t, as such we’ll work hard to make sure your campaign performs. Some of the manual optimization tasks we undertake include;
- Reduce the verticals – instead of Run of Network change to just Food Vertical
- Removing ad units on sites which have a low click through rate (CTR)
- Remove ad creative which has low click through rate (CTR)
- Implement impressions capping say 5/24 or 3/24
- Implement further geo-targeting
- Implement browser based or connection filters
- Suggest changing landing pages, remove fields
For more information about running your next advertising campaign with Gourmet Ads, download our media kit or request a proposal.
