These days its essential to stand out when Marketing or Advertising iPad Apps

The rapidly growing popularity of iPhone and iPad apps has fueled a boom in the creation of applications available to users. These apps include everything from maps to book recommendations, fashion advice, and even apps related to food and drink.

In the food areas, consumers are using these apps for a wide variety of things – from finding new recipes to looking for the best deal at the grocery store. Some of the hottest apps in the food world are offered by large national food chains, food television and magazines, and websites that feature new recipe ideas that can be accessed right from the grocery store.

Apps for the iPhone and iPad have made the at-home cooking trend even more accessible to home cooks and the grocery buyer. The ability to take recipes right into the grocery store without having to tote around several cookbooks means that consumers are able to address one of the biggest issues mentioned by shoppers- how to come up with new ideas to feed their families.

Advertising iPad Apps Helps Generate Sales and App Awareness

So if you’re an iPad App developer, how do you generate sales and installs of your app? By developing an advertising campaign with Gourmet around your food based iPad application, you’ll be marketing your application to your target audience.

In our experience when running campaigns advertising iPad Apps is to have a dedicated landing page which takes users to a page which can educate them about the app, what it does, even a video of the application. By having your own landing page and not sending consumers directly to the Apple iTunes store allows you place web beacons for retargeting consumers in the future.

Contact Gourmet Ads for more information about Advertising iPad Apps or Request A Proposal from the team.

Advertising iPad Apps 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.

Cookies are used by Online Retailers for all types of Tracking

Online consumers have become increasingly smart and increasingly picky about the products they research and buy online. Most customers will spend a significant amount of time researching products before they make a purchase, and many customers are open to using different websites to make their purchases if they see a better deal. The challenge for retailers is how to target their advertising to the customers who are most likely to make purchases from that retailer. That’s where our technology comes in – by using behavioral targeting and retargeting to put your site in front of the consumers who are most likely to buy.

Behavioral targeting can be used in numerous ways to give visitors to any site a personalized and relevant experience. We use cookies as a way to collect information about users without requiring the user to input information and without accessing any private information. Cookies are used by all kinds of websites for many reasons- such as tracking session information, maintaining site preferences, and keeping items in online shopping carts. Information contained in cookies does not identify the individual user, so you can be sure that your customer’s privacy is maintained, an important consideration for many users.

Imagine being able to release a television ad that was only seen by people wanting to by your product, right when they wanted to buy it. That is exactly the concept of behavioral targeting. When a customer visits your website, information about the things they have been shopping for is automatically collected in the form of cookies. That information is used to help load advertisements that relate to those items, turning a browser into a buyer by giving them the information they are looking for when they are looking for it. There are a number of ways that we can get your message in front of the right customers using behavioral targeting. For example, say that a potential customer visits the manufacturer’s site for a particular brand of small kitchen appliance. Gourmet Ads can track this visit, and then display an advertisement featuring that product on your website. Thus increasing the likelihood the consumer will purchase the product.

The problem with most traditional methods of advertising (say television or radio) is that they are essentially a guessing game, throwing your ad in front of visitors and hoping that they will connect the dots offline. Using technologies like behavioral targeted (also retargeting and sequential advertising) is the best way of making your advertising dollars work. Essentially, you are improving the odds that the people who see your advertisement are interested in buying your product. Behavioral targeting can be used not only to display certain advertisements at certain times, but also to offer specials and savings to customers who are likely to take advantage of those offers. For example, if a customer is searching through several sites looking for the best deal on a new mixer, offering free shipping or pointing out your rebate offer on new mixers can provide a significant benefit to your customer as well as increasing sales.

Cookies are the backbone of Behavioral Targeting and Retargeting

The combination of behavioral targeting and an ad campaign designed to turn shoppers into buyers can make your advertising dollars go farther. Gourmet Ads helps retailers market to the right customers at the right time by designing ad campaigns designed to make the shopping experience as personalized as possible. Cookies are the backbone of Behavioral Targeting and Retargeting.

Cookies and Online Retailers 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, 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 and we’ll help you develop a strategy that will get sales and revenue up.

Shopping Cart Abandonment 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.

Reach Shoppers with President’s Day Advertising

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 7^th or 8^th of February and should be wide reaching initially. Then about the 10^th or 11^th of February you should start running higher visibility units such as Floating Ads or Intersitial Advertising to gain attention, then rely on regular display throughout the network.

President’s Day Advertising should launch about 2 weeks prior to Presidents Day

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 President’s Day Advertising to your target demographic.

President’s Day 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.

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.

No Budget! Just ROI 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.

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 300×250, 728×90 and 160×600.

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.

Expandable Ad Units 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.

Have you developed a Retargeting Strategy for your Brand’s Website ?

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 via Retargeting them with highly related advertising. Since the Search Retargeting blog, we’ve had a great deal of enquiry asking about developing a client’s Retargeting Strategy 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. With a developed Retargeting Strategy, 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 behavior you can target this later in the purchasing cycle.

Who do you target?
There are few options to consider.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Re-Reach your Audience with a defined Retargeting Strategy

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, a Retargeting Strategy can leverage Sequential Advertising to reinforce your message as the consumer goes through the research and consideration process prior to completing a purchase.

Retargeting Strategy 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.

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.

*** Updated ****

12 months later, Schwan’s Foods continues to be the leader, see Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate – January 2010

Schwan’s Foods Top Online Retailer 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.