Purchasing Display Placement
When it comes to purchasing placement for your display ads, you basically have three options:
- you can purchase directly from sites,
- you can purchase through an ad network,
- or you can purchase through your marketing or advertising agency.
Purchasing directly from a site is clearly the least efficient mechanism of getting your ad placed. At a minimum, it requires you personally contacting the site, negotiating placement rates, media guidelines, and then ensuring that your ad complies with those media guidelines. If you really only have one or two key sites that absolutely match your desired target and have sufficient volume, then maybe it’s worth doing this; however, you need to keep in mind that each site you negotiate with is going to have different requirements. And they may or may not have ever done this before. If they haven’t, that can result in an extremely drawn-out process. Then, when you’re ready to go on to the second site, you have to start all over again; and if you can’t get them to agree to exactly the same media requirements, then you may have to redesign your ad to meet the terms of that second agreement. I don’t want to completely discount this sort of individual negotiation — there’s definitely a time and a place for it. But for almost every business, there’s an easier way to go.
Ad networks are businesses that pre-negotiate these terms with sites all across the Internet. They buy space everywhere they can, under pre-defined media terms. This gives you tremendous advantage. First, you only have to design your ad to meet one set of requirements (which can be a huge savings in both time and money). Second, their tremendous coverage provides you with as many eyeballs as you could possibly desire. And third, because of that tremendous coverage and the technology behind it, they are able to be extremely targeted in where they place your ad. Their ability to target ads can seem almost magical, and we’ll get into that in more detail in the next section on targeting your display ad, but first, let’s get back to those eyeballs. Here is a list of the top five ad networks in the US and their reach according to comScore. The total audience (unique US Internet users for the month) was just under 193 million.
| Network | Unique Visitors (000) | % of Audience |
|---|---|---|
| Platform-A | 176,455 | 91.49% |
| Yahoo! Network | 167,129 | 86.65% |
| Google Ad Network | 164,518 | 85.30% |
| ValueClick Networks | 160,307 | 83.11% |
| Specific Media | 158,012 | 81.92% |
Those numbers never cease to amaze me. Think about that. Any one of the top five networks gives you access to over 150 million unique pairs of eyeballs per month. Put another way, you know that Superbowl ad you bought earlier this year? It didn’t quite reach 99 million viewers.
The last way to place your display ad is with an advertising or marketing agency. Typically, an agency will charge a 15% mark-up on media buys (e.g., your ad placement). Why, you ask, should you pay 15% extra for your placement? Well, you shouldn’t — and you won’t … in fact, you may end up paying less. You see, they charge a 15% mark-up on their price, and because they’re buying lots of eyeballs (remember, they’re buying for all of their clients), they’re almost certainly able to get better rates than you are. With the agency mark-up, it usually comes to break-even from a pure price perspective, and sometimes you actually end up paying less.
Targeting Your Display Ad
Targeting is where on-line display advertising really shines — it’s the magic that separates it from traditional display advertising. First of all, you can target by standard demographic data: sex, race, age, income, geography. This brings (actually, improves upon) the power of TV advertising to display advertising. Obviously, with a classic display ad, you have a great deal of control over geography. And to some limited extent (by virtue of that geography), you have control over sex, race, age, and income. For TV ads, you have much greater control. To use an historical example, if you were targeting men between the ages of 35 and 49, then you might have run your ad during the Monty Python show, where men in that age group made up 47% of the viewership. But you would still have been wasting over half of your exposure on people outside of your target audience. With on-line display advertising, you can dial this in and make your ad as focused as you would like. You want to advertise to Hispanic women between the ages of 18 and 24 who live in Omaha, Nebraska? No problem. Your ad will only appear for people who match those criteria.
But on-line display ads can be much more targeted than that. Let’s go back to our running example of the paddle sports shop. Say it’s the end of the season, and a manufacturer has discontinued a certain line of kayak paddles. You really want to push those, so you have the cash and the space to stock up on the new model for next season. You could run a display ad that targets only people who have purchased kayaks!
And then, there’s the pièce de résistance. Everyone knows that brands are built by familiarity. You want people to see your message over and over again. On-line display ads enable this through what’s known as “retargeting”. In other words, you can say something like, “I want this ad to appear to people who have been to my website”. Then, let’s say someone comes to your website through your SEM activities. They go away. The next day, they’re on-line again, and reading their news at nytimes.com. But instead of seeing an ad for the Hyatt, they see your ad — because the advertising networks were able to retarget them.
Never before in the history of advertising have we had the power to target market as effectively as we do with the Internet. It’s an amazing tool at your disposal that can have dramatic impact on the success of your marketing efforts. But it does have implications. In order to really harness the power of on-line display ads, you have to actually know who your target audience is.