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.

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.

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.

As we roll onto 2010 or “Twenty Ten” as many are calling it, I though it might be good to take a quick look back to some of the Most Popular Blogs we wrote this year. Just like 2009, during 2010 we’ll try to write as many blogs as we can helping to educate advertisers, media buyers and owners on how to advertise online and reach your target audience.

So here we go, the Most Popular for 2009

• 2010 Advertising Trends
• Targeting Grocery Buyers
• Online Drives CPG Sales
• Reaching Holiday Shoppers
• Grocery Store Loyalty Programs
• Display Ads Trigger Search
• Reaching Working Moms
• Creative Advertising
• More Cooking at Home
• Increasing Click Through Rates
• Interstitial Advertising

Maybe you had a favourite blog on Gourmet Ads during 2009?

Most Popular for 2009 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.

Expected Click Through Rate for Advertisers

One of the most common questions our sales team are asked is what sort of Click Through Rate should I expect when running a display campaign with Gourmet Ads?

Well there are a number of factors in answering this question. Typically our endemic clients (like food and wine advertisers) see click through rates (CTR) of anywhere between .19% and 3.8% (yes you read that correct). This because we try to only to run relevant advertising campaigns with in each vertical. Our aim is that food goes with food and wine goes with wine. On occasions we do have clients who actually want to reach a wine audience.

Factors that contribute to high Click Through Rates include;

• clear messaging|
• engaging creative
• strong branding (brand or product)
• video or flash animation
• proposition or call to action

Finally, the click through rate isn’t always an accurate measurement for the success of an advertising campaign. Recent industry research indicates that branding is just as effective in creating brand recognition as in actually clicking on an ad. We’ve previously written a blog on this topic called Its not always about the click which is well worth the read. For more information on the estimated Click Through Rate and Engagement Rates for campaigns, please Contact Us.

Click Through Rate 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.