CAMPAIGN TO ATTRACT A TARGET AUDIENCE
If you want to get the attention of a target audience you have to ascertain that the banner exchange you have joined offers you the necessary tools to achieve your goal. These tools include:
A- Targeting profiles: One website’s targeting requirements might vary from another and whereas one owner uses particular combinations of software to attract the viewers, another might need a particular combination of time, interest for technology and web access speed to promote their product successfully. Hence, for a target audience comprising of office users from a particular area (San Diego) and most susceptible to your offer between 2 to 4 p.m. on business days, ensure that the banner exchange you use can generate exactly that combination of restrictions. If you target Web TV users as your audience who shows great interest for a particular technology in the European Union, your exchange can set that one combination of restrictions to cut clearly across all the others.
Remember, never settle for anything less than perfect targeting and each untargeted impression becomes your loss. A profile must contain all the options you need and the absence of even a single one will result in a dramatic increase in the untargeted impressions. If you really want to target from a particular region, but settle for another only you will have a conversion drop of about 8-10 times your average. In short , most businesses require a combination of minimum 3-4 different limitations in a single targeting profile to pinpoint a given target audience successfully.
B- Multiple ads and targeting profiles: Since the target audience is not the same for any site minimum two banner ads are usually required to attract as many targeted members as possible. For a site devoted to freeware, use as many ads as you have subsections to your website with each banner clearly showing the particulars. For example, though the categories ‘MS Windows drivers’, ‘Nix mail clients’, ‘Free Mac games’ etc can be displayed in the same website, each attracts entirely different viewers. And each type is likely to respond to a relevant banner ad instead of a generic ‘Best free downloads’. So it becomes essential for you to set a specific profile for each banner and display each sub-campaign at the same time on a particular site. Then compare the results to those gained using single generic ads. If no substantial improvement found, rethink and make changes in the targeting limitations.
C- Multiple Target Links: Several viewers get irritated if something seen on a banner is not found on the very first page of your site. If your banner contains the beginning of a joke to attract viewers, they expect the punchline to the same joke when they open your site. If your ad offers some special ‘discount’, that very discount must welcome the visitors when they reach your site. If you display such banners on the same site, they should have two different destination links. So confirm if your exchange permits to use on your banners multiple URLs that might differ from the URL provided at the time of registration.
D- Interactive Ad Formats: Selection of ad formats is crucial to promote online marketing. Plain ‘gif’ ads may help branding, but for higher conversions you have to consider working cgi-forms and useable menus, multi-click flash ads and scroll bars in HTML banners. Check carefully if such ads are really supported by the exchange you select.
E- Evaluation: You have to plan well before and identify exactly how you will track your ad results. An ad’s click-through rate has very little in common with the actual increase in the number of viewers. You, therefore, need some post-click analysis to measure the efficiency of each campaign. Studies have shown that a banner with a low click-through rate has produced much better results than a banner with higher click-through rate. So go for an exchange with some built-in post-click analyzer as only action-based analysis can move from click-through rate to return on investment-based studies.
A- Targeting profiles: One website’s targeting requirements might vary from another and whereas one owner uses particular combinations of software to attract the viewers, another might need a particular combination of time, interest for technology and web access speed to promote their product successfully. Hence, for a target audience comprising of office users from a particular area (San Diego) and most susceptible to your offer between 2 to 4 p.m. on business days, ensure that the banner exchange you use can generate exactly that combination of restrictions. If you target Web TV users as your audience who shows great interest for a particular technology in the European Union, your exchange can set that one combination of restrictions to cut clearly across all the others.
Remember, never settle for anything less than perfect targeting and each untargeted impression becomes your loss. A profile must contain all the options you need and the absence of even a single one will result in a dramatic increase in the untargeted impressions. If you really want to target from a particular region, but settle for another only you will have a conversion drop of about 8-10 times your average. In short , most businesses require a combination of minimum 3-4 different limitations in a single targeting profile to pinpoint a given target audience successfully.
B- Multiple ads and targeting profiles: Since the target audience is not the same for any site minimum two banner ads are usually required to attract as many targeted members as possible. For a site devoted to freeware, use as many ads as you have subsections to your website with each banner clearly showing the particulars. For example, though the categories ‘MS Windows drivers’, ‘Nix mail clients’, ‘Free Mac games’ etc can be displayed in the same website, each attracts entirely different viewers. And each type is likely to respond to a relevant banner ad instead of a generic ‘Best free downloads’. So it becomes essential for you to set a specific profile for each banner and display each sub-campaign at the same time on a particular site. Then compare the results to those gained using single generic ads. If no substantial improvement found, rethink and make changes in the targeting limitations.
C- Multiple Target Links: Several viewers get irritated if something seen on a banner is not found on the very first page of your site. If your banner contains the beginning of a joke to attract viewers, they expect the punchline to the same joke when they open your site. If your ad offers some special ‘discount’, that very discount must welcome the visitors when they reach your site. If you display such banners on the same site, they should have two different destination links. So confirm if your exchange permits to use on your banners multiple URLs that might differ from the URL provided at the time of registration.
D- Interactive Ad Formats: Selection of ad formats is crucial to promote online marketing. Plain ‘gif’ ads may help branding, but for higher conversions you have to consider working cgi-forms and useable menus, multi-click flash ads and scroll bars in HTML banners. Check carefully if such ads are really supported by the exchange you select.
E- Evaluation: You have to plan well before and identify exactly how you will track your ad results. An ad’s click-through rate has very little in common with the actual increase in the number of viewers. You, therefore, need some post-click analysis to measure the efficiency of each campaign. Studies have shown that a banner with a low click-through rate has produced much better results than a banner with higher click-through rate. So go for an exchange with some built-in post-click analyzer as only action-based analysis can move from click-through rate to return on investment-based studies.