President’s Day Advertising
February 2, 2010 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
One of the first big retail shopping weekends of the year is President’s Day and most retailers offer significant savings off products. To achieve great high sales it’s essential that your President’s Day Advertising campaign includes a wide reaching digital aspect to drive consumers to both your online store or bricks and mortar stores.
For those that don’t know, Presidents Day was originally known as Washington’s Birthday in honor of the first US president, George Washington’s birthday on February 22, 1732. President’s Day is a federal holiday in the United States and is generally celebrated on the third Monday of February.
Ideally your President’s Day Advertising should launch about 2 weeks prior to Presidents Day weekend on or about the 7th or 8th of February and should be wide reaching initially. Then about the 10th or 11th of February you should start running higher visibility units such as floating ads or interstitial advertising to gain attention, then rely on regular display throughout the network.
President Day Weekend is a great weekend for discounts, so make sure that your offers are exceptional. Remember your competitors will be in the market too undertaking President’s Day Advertising of their own. So have a clear offering in order to stand out.
So no matter if your advertising campaign has a national focus or local focus, Gourmet Ads can deliver your Presidents Day Advertising to your target demographic. For more information, Download our Media Kit or contact us for a proposal.
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.
Shopping Cart Abandonment
September 16, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · 1 Comment
For those that don’t know, shopping cart abandonment is when a visitor initiates your checkout process but leaves before completing their purchase. The issue of shopping cart abandonment is constantly measured and tweaked by nearly every ecommerce site in the world, because increasing the conversion rate can boost revenue significantly. There are dozens of “on the page” things that can be done, but in reality potential consumers will always abandon the checkout process.
Reasons which contribute to Shopping Cart Abandonment include;
- Just browsing and had no intention of purchasing anyway
- Product prices were too high
- Didn’t have the product, model, colour size etc
- Shipping costs were too high
- Desired product was out of stock
- Wasn’t 100% comfortable with the store
- Checkout process was simply to complicated
- Checkout requires too much personal information
- Site requires registration before purchase
- Shopping Cart didn’t work properly or they encountered errors
- Didn’t have a valid SSL certificate
- Didn’t take preferred credit card type
So apart from on page changes what can be done to decrease the rate of abandonment and increase the rate of successful transactions? Using Gourmet Ads wide range of campaign targeting options; we can develop a comprehensive retargeting campaign that will bring back potential consumers and increase your conversion rate.
So as an example, Gourmet Ads currently works with a mid sized ecommerce store which retails a wide range of gourmet food products and delivers around the world. When a visitor goes to the site, Gourmet Ads strategically drops session cookies throughout the checkout process. These are dropped at key times such as;
1. Everyone that visits the site
2. Everyone that visits the site via clicking on an advertisement
3. Everyone that adds an item to the basket
4. Everyone that clicked the checkout button, but doesn’t complete the transaction.
5. Everyone that makes a successful purchase
The Gourmet Food store then has long term campaigns running with Gourmet Ads which runs appropriate advertising campaign depending on where consumers are in the buying cycle. So for example someone that simply visits the site may then see an ad with messaging such as signup for our newsletter and get free shipping on your next order. But the best converting ads are the ones who have clicked the checkout button but didn’t complete the transaction. These consumers will see ads for major incentives such as 30% off your order, Two for One or free shipping.
These principles aren’t just for online gourmet food stores; they can be applied to any other ecommerce site or lead generation site. So if you run a food or wine ecommerce store and haven’t developed a consumer retargeting campaign for your site to minimize shopping cart abandonment, then contact us. We’ll help you develop a strategy that will get sales and revenue up.
Expandable Ad Units
July 9, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Advertisers and particularly advertising agencies are always looking at techniques to engage with an audience online and showcase their brand. One such way is via Expandable Ad Units. Expandable Ad Units do as they suggest; they expand outside of their usual size and spread over the top of the page content, either by auto expand, on click or rollover. Audio and video need to be initiated users directly. Gourmet Ads now offers Expandable Ad Units on all 3 creative sizes, which are 300 x 250, 728 x 90 and 160 x 600. See Gourmet Ads Expandable Ad Specifications.
One of the great things about Expandable Ad Units is the ability to include video not only in the initial load, but in the expand offering a rich experience to audiences. Add to this the increase in real estate allows you to add more features than you’d normally include in an ad unit. Some of the expanding ad units we’ve run are very “widget like” allowing users to interact with them more. You could also collect data from the user, or offer a print out – all done in the ad unit.
In our experience, Expandable Ad Units vastly out perform regular creative by at least 30% campaign to campaign. This because the campaign is visually appealing to the audience, encouraging them to engage with the campaign directly. Combine both Expandable Ad Units and regular display ads together in a road blocking campaign and you’ll have the same sort of reach that TV achieves.
So how could you as the advertiser use Expandable Ad Units on the Gourmet Ads network?
Easy, here are a few quick ideas;
- Showcase a product in a recipe with video and techniques
- Show a map of your all of your stores
- Celebrity Chef using your products via a video
- New wine release with a video from the wine maker
- Food and Wine pairing
- Movie Trailer
- New Car Release
If you’re looking at undertaking an advertising campaign and need to make an impact, consider using Expandable Ad Units. For more information, please download our media kit or request a proposal from us.
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.
Schwans Foods Top Online Retailer
March 1, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Every ecommerce site on the planet is trying to work out how to increase their ecommerce site’s conversation rates by tweaking the site here and there. Literally just a 1% increase in conversion rates can make a significant impact on revenue and profitability. We’ve previously written about this in a blog on Landing Pages and Conversion Rates. but we’ve never discussed the impact on conversion rates on an ecommerce site till now.
What prompted this blow was when I saw by surprise, that the Top Online Retailer by Conversion Rate for January 2009 was a food site – www.schwans.com. As you can see from the graph, Schwans Foods converted over 50% of their traffic to customers. To be considered, e-commerce sites must have had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month and was based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates.
For those that don’t know Schwans Foods does home delivery and mail order of frozen foods and dairy products including ice creams, entrees, meats and desserts throughout American. I don’t know what Schwans Foods has done to increase their conversion rate, it’s probably not just one thing but a host of changes. It could even be promotional emails, coupons or online food advertising which has driven the sales.
If was the owner of an ecommerce site, I’d be taking a look over the Schwans foods website looking for some of the techniques which has helped them got to the number one Top Online Retailer by Conversion Rate for January 2009.
Search Retargeting
February 23, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
For many companies their entire online advertising strategy relates to search. They purchase related keywords, phrases, branded text and competitor names in the search engines on a pay per click model or PPC. For some, the pay per click search advertising model works very effectively, but for others companies where the click of a consumer doesn’t convert it can be very expensive running lead generation or direct response campaigns on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft Advertising or any other pay per click network. For those that fit the later, Search Retargeting with display advertising is a strategy which will help reduce some of the churn and increase conversation rates.
Search retargeting is a behavioral targeting technique where a user who searches and clicks on your text ad is taken to your landing page. At this time, using a cookie we record the search term and any related information needed on the user’s machine, ie such as the campaign or category. Then when that user hits a site within the Gourmet Ads network we serve relevant display ads to a user based on the search query and behaviour made earlier on the landing page.
We can even go one step further. For those consumers that go deeper in the transaction and don’t complete it we can server a separate cookie indicating this. So if they save their shopping cart and don’t complete, we could for 30 days target them to return to the site and complete the transaction at a given discount. So for say the first 7 days we could offer 5% off through to 20 days offer 25% discount to encourage them to return. You might even want to run a campaign about a product they added to their cart. The ideas are endless. Think of search retargeting as the ability to continue to talk with your target market after they initially left your landing page or ecommerce site.
Because you’ve already established a relationship with the consumer and they are pre-qualified, the conversion rates are much higher than simply running a display advertising campaign. The key however to running a search retargeting campaign is going wide with as much inventory as you possibly can. By running a search retargeting campaign with Gourmet Ads we not only can provide our inventory, we can also back onto the inventory with our media and ad serving partner Adify to extend the reach of your campaign. This is an essential part of any search retargeting campaign.
Sure the CPM rate will be slightly higher compared to a regular display campaign, but because you already have a relationship with the consumer and they are pre-qualified the benefits of conversion out way the slight cost difference. Search retargeting can be a great strategy to undertake and for any company that solely relies on search marketing and is a risk free way to continue the conversation with your consumer or target market.
Search retargeting keeps consumers engaged with more personalized, relevant advertising experiences, leading to higher click-through rates and conversions. To learn more about search retargeting, contact us or request a proposal for a campaign.
Optimizing Advertising Campaigns
February 6, 2009 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
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 maximise 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.
No Budget! Just ROI
December 16, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · Leave a Comment
Recently a prospective client said they had no budget for online advertising. I immediately thought he was trying to be misleading as this company’s advertisements appear on a number of sites on the internet. So I said to this to the company’s marketing manager that I’d seen there ads on sites on the internet and they said, we have no budget, just ROI. At the time their strategy wasn’t clear to me, but after learning and seeing it action, I now understand it backwards. Since that first conversation, I’ve heard this a number of times after talking with prospective clients and thought its worth sharing with you.
Most professionally run online stores know their conversion rates when a particular audience visits their store, ie a 5% conversion rate means that for every 100 people that visit the site, 5 actually make a purchase. Apart from conversion rates, most ecommerce managers know how many times consumers visit the online store before they purchase, how many pages they’ll look at, where they are located and how much they usually spend. Most of this intelligence can be sourced from various web analytic tools like Google Analytics or Web Trends as well as custom reports and metrics.
So after they know the kind of customer that spends, the challenge is how to find these consumers online, and then drive them to the store. Savvy advertisers will generally run a short trial campaign for say 2 – 4 weeks with a budget of say $5000 to see what kind of audience an advertiser like Gourmet Ads delivers and if they are actually buyers. Some channels drive traffic, but they don’t buy.
Once these savvy advertisers know the conversion rate, they can work out the return on investment (ROI) on the advertising costs. Once they’ve got a return on investment in mind, they’ll book ongoing advertising over multiple months, monitoring the return on investment and not the budget. As long as the sales continue these savvy advertisers purely monitor the sales and renew the advertising. The key here isn’t to get complacent; it’s essential to continually change the advertising message, branding and look and feel of the advertising as well as the deal to ensure that audiences continue to be engaged with the advertising.
Because the quality of the click in vertical advertising networks is much more qualified than horizontal networks, we can continue to drive the same levels of return on investment for advertisers over time. See a recent post titled Vertical Advertising Increases ROI.
If you’d like to learn more about the Gourmet Ads vertical advertising network, request a media kit.
Landing Pages and Conversion Rates
November 12, 2008 by Benjamin Christie · 2 Comments
Today we are going to take a moment to discuss the importance of landing pages and their effects on conversion rates. First of all, let’s go over the vocabulary: A landing page is the first page a customer sees when they click on your advertisement. Your conversion rate is the percentage of the viewers to you website that take a desired action which might be purchasing a product or signing up for your newsletter. Even those companies, who have no intention of selling their products directly online, such as breakfast cereals and ice cream manufacturers, need to have effective landing pages in order to make the most of their online marketing campaigns.
A landing page should usually not be the same as the company’s homepage in most cases. In order to prompt a viewer to action and achieve high conversion rates the website needs to be as specific as possible and make the desired action very clear. A great example of an effective use of landing pages to increase (and track) conversion rates would be a potato chip brand that places an ad. When a viewer clicks on the advertisement they are directed to a landing page all about that brand of potato chips. The call to action on the landing page encourages the viewer to “click here” to download a coupon for the potato chips. Since the person was interested in the potato chips when they clicked the ad, the conversion rates are likely to be quite high. Many people will likely download the coupon and buy the chips on their next shopping trip.
There are several ways for a company to judge the effectiveness of their landing pages and increase their conversion rates. One of the most effective ways is through the use of split testing. Split testing allows a company to create two or more different versions of landing pages and send a segment of their clicks to each one. Then they can view the conversion rates for each landing page version and choose the most effective one. The companies with the highest conversion rates make a habit of regularly split testing their landing pages and making various tweaks and adjustments, because the market is ever changing and there is no guarantee that what worked last month will still be as effective this month.
So how effective do you think your landing page is? Feel free to leave a comment below.
