High Visibility Placements are Popular for 2012 Media Planning

We’re only a few months into 2011 and there is already a lot of media planning and buying for advertising campaigns in 2012. Just like last year, the RFPs we’re seeing now from digital advertising agencies are mostly for companies planning media from July 2011 through to June 2012 activity. Also like last year, the budgets of RFPs continue to increase, suggesting that advertising budgets are moving away are traditional advertising areas like print and television.

The current trend on most of the 2012 Media Planning RFPs is around high visibility placements. Sure regular display ad units (728×90, 300×250 and 160×600) continue to be the most requested by advertisers, however many advertising agencies are now requesting high visibility units for maximum impact. This includes the 300×600 ad unit as well as Video Advertising, Background Skins, Intersitials and Over the Page, We believe this trend will continue right into 2012 and beyond.

2012 Media Planning that we’re undertaking for advertisers, starts with display ad units for maximum reach across the duration of the plan. Depending on the client and their own goals, we’ll create peak activity around key periods in their year. Some advertisers will want their peak activity around holidays, others will prefer it to be on a weekly basis concentrating on one or two days of the week. Whatever your goals, we’ll develop a media plan that exceeds your goals.

Brands are already undertaking 2012 Media Planning

Interestingly the majority of 2012 Media Planning we’ve seen so far has been for non-endemic advertisers, ie non food and wine companies. Advertising agencies have recognized the value of our female grocery buying audience which has seen RFPs from companies in tourism, financial, automotive and retail spaces indicating that many brand advertisers are seeking quality inventory out of their “safe” and endemic advertising locations.

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. Contact Us now if you’re undertaking 2012 Media Planning.

2012 Media Planning is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

Free Shipping is such a powerful motivator for consumers to purchase

This concept of Free Shipping has been debated since the beginning of internet sales and has driven many marketing and operational decisions. While there are a variety of opinions, supported by anecdotal and empirical evidence, it has become clear that consumers prefer free shipping and base many of their internet purchases on this factor. As the economy has presented increased challenges, online retailers have been forced to consider anything that will allow them to maintain or improve sales.

Retailers have to offer consumers a strong reason to shop online. There are few factors that elicit a stronger reaction than free shipping. In fact, free shipping can be such a powerful motivator that it can cause consumers to act irrationally. David Bell, Wharton Marketing Instructor, has observed that consumers will favor an offer which provides them with $6.99 of free shipping over a $10 discount on the product.

Online retailers spend a significant amount of their resources to encourage customers to shop on their site. According to the data, this expenditure can be undone by shipping charges. The E-tailing Group’s 2008 survey noted that seventy-eight percent of customers reported that the prohibitive costs of shipping discouraged them from making online purchases. Even those customers who have placed items in their online shopping carts can be lost, if shipping charges are added to the bill. PayPal and comScore’s 2008 survey revealed that forty-three percent of customers would abandon their shopping cart if they felt shipping prices were too high.

In addition to serving as a motivation to purchase online, free shipping was also found to determine which retailers consumers would use to make their online purchases. A Forrester Research poll released in 2008 found that seventy-five percent of consumers prefer to shop with online retailers that offer free shipping. A 2008 comScore study reinforced these results when it demonstrated that seventy-two percent of consumers would switch to a different online retailer if their current retailer discontinued free shipping.

Free shipping has also been shown to create a more positive purchasing experience.

Free shipping has also been shown to create a more positive purchasing experience. Debra Miller, from Compete, reported that their Online Shopper Survey showed that consumers rated their shopping experience ten percentage points higher than those who paid for shipping. She also reported that, “high shipping costs were rated as the number one reason why consumers were not satisfied with their online shopping experience.”

As has been demonstrated by the above, free shipping is a factor at every point of the online purchase. In order to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by online shopping, retailers have to review their shipping policies. To maximize the return on an online store, free shipping is essential.

Free Shipping Is Essential is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

Dynamic Ads can be created in either Flash or HTML

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, Geo Targeting 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

One of the creative developers we like is a Spongecell. They develop interactive creative that can combine video, social network and other engagement points.

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 ads from concept to reality and deliver them to our audience of highly engaged grocery buyers.

Dynamic Ads is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

For those that don’t know, a floating ad (or Over the Page Advertising ) is a type of rich media advertisement that appears uninitiated, superimposed over a web page, then disappears after a specific time period (typically 7-15 seconds). This Beyond the Banner activity can be as simple as a static JPG through to Flash sequence or full video. Floating Ads are ideal for movie trailers or using your TV commercial assets online.

Floating Ads can be any shape or size, however we’ve been having great success with a 800×600 anchored floating ad size. This particular Floating Ad unit which is similar to an interstitial is launched through an existing IAB unit on the page, it then pushes up to a 800×600 for maximum effect. After 10 seconds the creative closes, but in the IAB unit that launched the ad, there is a left behind allowing people to click that if they didn’t click the 800×600 unit while it was running.

If you’re charged with driving traffic to your website, then we’d recommend including some sort of Floating Ad execution as part of your overall media plan. If you haven’t built a floating ad previously or don’t know where to start, Gourmet Ads can take your existing raw flash files and create the floating ad for you. We’d need a basic direction on the messaging and style guidelines, but from there our team can create it.

High CTRs with Floating Ads is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

We are seeing Increased Advertising Budgets with 2011 Media Planning

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 undertaking media planning 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 ad units, background advertising and interstitial advertising all which can be executed through Gourmet Ads. We’re also seeing a lot of requests for social networking elements as part of campaigns.

Many Food and Wine Brands are already undertaking 2011 Media Planning

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. For more information about 2011 Media Planning, Contact Us.

2011 Media Planning is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

There are two important parts to every online advertising campaign and both being equally important when it comes to Optimizing Advertising Campaigns. So what are they?

These are ;

1. The “where” refers to websites and blogs that are relevant to your target audience.
2. The “what” refers to your actual advertising creative you provide.

First off, let’s talk about the “Where”. No matter the campaign, there will always be a publisher where your advertising gets plenty of impressions, but attracts very few click throughs. So, instead of wasting your advertising dollars, the trafficking staff at Gourmet Ads can, mid duration optimize your advertising campaigns to maximize clicks and performance. Optimizing Advertising Campaigns is an important part of every campaign and a simple cull of non-performing sites can significantly increase the aggregated click through rate of the campaign.

Now comes the “What”. Depending on the creative, some ads will perform better than other within the same campaign. We regularly receive from advertisers, multiple advertising creative for a campaign. A week after the campaign has launched, Gourmet Ads can optimize your advertising campaigns by removing the creative that isn’t performing. Of course you have to try different things once in a while to see what works and what doesn’t, but once you find out that a particular creative isn’t performing it is time to pull it and focus on the ads that are working to maximize your advertising campaigns effectiveness. When this happens we simply shift the budget from the non-performing advertisement across to the performing creative.

Optimizing Advertising Campaigns is all about increasing their performance and the return for advertisers, so if your advertising network isn’t optimizing your campaigns, contact Gourmet Ads and book your media with us.

Optimizing Advertising Campaigns is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

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.

Post Impression Tracking is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

Increase the click through rates on campaigns with Gourmet Ads

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 rates 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 DayPart 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 rates and removing them from the buy instantly.

Increasing Click Through Rates is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

Do you have a strategy when developing your Creative Advertising Artwork ?

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.

Creative Advertising Tips

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.

Have a Creative Advertising Brief
Advertising agencies specialize 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 for your Creative Advertising.

Creative Advertising is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.

Some call it the Island Ad, others call it the MREC or Medium Rectangle. Whatever you actually call it, the 300×250 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 300×250 has a click rate 20%-30% higher than other ad units on a page.

So why does the 300×250 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 300×250 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 300×250 ad unit. Video was designed to be there.

Becoming more and more popular with advertisers is the expandable ad units. We’ve run expandable 300×250 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 300×250 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.

300×250 – The Top Performer is a blog post from Gourmet Ads Food Advertising network, providing Display Advertising , Video Advertising and Supermarket Advertising solutions to reach the Grocery Buyer online.