🥇 Display advertising agency | Grow quicker with the best

Broadly speaking, a banner ad is any image or video paid to be placed on a website, including paid posts on social media.

However, for Cogney’s purposes, when we say “Banner Ads” in our menu of services, we mean “programmatic” or “display” ads which appear on the bottom, top and sides of publisher websites or email newsletters and exclude paid social media posts.

You can purchase banner advertising on a CPC or CPM basis. Whereas you only get charged when someone actually clicks on your ad in the former case, you buy a certain number of impressions up front if you elect to pay for banner ads on a CPM basis. We generally discourage clients from buying ads on a CPM basis because there is no assurance that any traffic will result from such a campaign.

Why run banner ads?

Sometimes no amount of words can do justice to a product. For that matter, some categories of products are inherently more difficult to describe in words than others. For example, it’s easier to describe, say, a toaster, in words, than a unique diamond bracelet.
Banner ads create prompts in situations where someone is not yet searching for something but might become interested in the product if presented with an ad. As an advertiser, the question arises, why would I want to spend money on advertising to people who aren’t looking for my kind of product or who are not prepared to buy on the spot? First, the publisher may have access to a very specific audience which is very difficult to target independently, e.g., readers of the New York Times are much more affluent, educated, fashionable, cosmopolitan, cultured and politically correct than the rest of America. Depending on what you are selling, this select and narrow demographic may dovetail perfectly with your business. Then, many studies have shown that consumers must encounter a brand at least seven times before they remember it. The more touchpoints the better. Considering that there’s a lot of groundwork to be laid before a consumer clicks the “buy” button, advertising, messaging and promoting well beforehand are crucial to moving the consumer along the purchase trajectory.
For the same reason that a picture is worth a thousand words, banner ads can be effective brand-building tools. Some concepts and values are better conveyed in visual or pictorial format, e.g., high energy, decisiveness, extravagance. That observation is especiallly true in the case of brands built on style, design or originality. Banner ads allow such brands to convey the crux of their value-add much more effectively than words
Banner ads are a good way to introduce unprecedented newfangled products because it would never dawn on someone to type them into the Google search box. A good example is a device for filling up multiple water balloons. Or a “Nebia shower” (a sustainable shower based on steam and micro-droplets).

While we would never tell a client to run just banner ads because they are published in contexts less likely to lead directly to conversion, banner ads can be a useful supplement to paid search advertising because they reinforce brand name retention, increasing the chances of a conversion.

Our Approach

Design

The first step is creating ads. Not only must banner ads be made in specific designated dimensions to be servable on as many publisher sites as possible, but Cogney advises on best practice in order to maximize the impact of each ad creative. Some of these considerations include image-to-text ratio, colors, readability, animation, etc. Others are based on psychological elements including symmetry, patterns, and repetition, which our brains find inherently pleasing.

Targeting

The second step is ad targeting.

Banner ads generally fall into two buckets, prospecting ads served to new people and retargeting or remarketing ads which are served to people who have already visited your website.

1. Prospecting

We target prospecting ads based on various criteria including demographics, device, cadence, geography, interests, in-market audiences (i.e., people with a demonstrated interest in a specific market or product), context (i.e., the appearance of a designated keyword on the publisher’s site triggers the publication of the ad), etc. An advertiser can also directly select the sites on which he would like to run banner ads.

2. Remarketing

For remarketing ads, we devise campaigns using a different logic. As opposed to prospects, this audience already has a demonstrated interest in the advertiser’s website or product. Therefore, it’s not about first-time enticement but closing the deal. Thus, we look at their buying or shopping behavior and can serve ads based on a previous purchase or progress until a certain point in the conversion funnel. Other strategies for retargeting include latency (getting back in touch with a purchaser after a certain amount of time has elapsed), cross-selling (recommending related products, say, diapers, to a customer who’s bought baby formula) and serving ads to the company’s existing email database.

Optimization

The optimization process is based on reallocation of budget based on continuous A/B testing of ad creative and monitoring the performance of various audience segments to sculpt the best-forming target profile over time.

Not surprisingly, retargeting ads are very effective since they reach an audience with an already-expressed interest in your website. The average click-through rate for prospecting display ads is 0.07%, while the average CTR for retargeted ads is about 0.7%.

A retargeting audience is, however, limited by definition. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure a steady funnel of new leads through well-designed prospecting campaigns. When these two banner campaigns work together hand in glove, they can be powerful drivers to conversion, with the welcome side benefit of driving home brand retention.