Performance Display Advertising - Best Practice for Brands/Advertisers

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Display Advertising has come a long way. What started as traditional direct advertising, moved towards ad networks. The tech in display Advertising then progressed to the automation of buying and selling digital media which is famously known as Programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising paved the way for a unique type of digital marketing called Performance advertising or Performance Marketing or performance display Marketing.

What is Performance Advertising?

It is a form of digital advertising that is result-driven. The ‘result’ or ‘Conversions’ here could be clicks, leads, sale, downloads, etc. The advertiser pays for these results and not just for the impressions that lead to these “results”. This is appealing for the advertisers because it is Quantifiable and Equitable. They pay for what they get.

Here are a few best practices that advertisers should keep in mind before signing up for a performance campaign.

Drive branding and Consideration – While performance campaigns are conversion-based, the advertisers should be aware that it is important to have a branding phase before expecting the users to convert. They need to run awareness campaigns, ensure the users create a connection with the product, collect user info, and analyze website behavior.

Avoid Short Duration campaigns – While the advertisers can run separate Awareness campaigns, it is also important to run a branding phase within the existing campaign.  A learning phase can be created in the first two weeks of the campaign duration and a conversion phase is automatically created for the remainder of the flight.

Retarget Audience – Performance campaigns work best when they are targeted to audiences who are already aware of the product or someone who has shown interest in the product before. The chances of conversions are much higher with a retargeted user. Hence pixel implementation at the right sections (Ads or sites) is paramount during the branding phase so that these users can be retargeted during the conversion phase. 

Here is a CPA and site visit comparison between prospecting and retargeting for a Mobile Network brand with an extensive presence in the US for the time period of March to May 2020.

The chart shows us that both Cost per final conversion and the site visits is much better for a retargeted campaign than prospecting.

Simple Purchase Funnel Navigation – Let’s say an insurance company wants to attract customers to their online portal with their end goal as insurance Purchase. While the user is going to purchase only if it is an absolutely worthy product, the advertiser should also enable the user to complete the purchase by creating a simple website navigation atmosphere and minimal possible clicks. This could make the purchase intent much higher.

Website Analytics – Brands should be able to analyze which of their web pages yields better results, and which doesn’t. It then makes more sense to navigate users to these better yielding pages.

Simple yet effective Ad Messaging – While the tech can do its job to grab conversions, the ad that is shown to the user needs to be simple yet creative and the messaging must resonate with the current scenario. Taking Covid -19 as an example, people around the world are looking for Solutions, Information, and most importantly Compassion. Brands have already altered their ad messaging that reflects one or all the above that best suits the nature of the product. We live in a world where getting a user to click a banner ad is extremely difficult, it is imperative the ad is appealing to the user.

Performance Marketing is going to find relevance increasingly in the coming days. Advertisers would no longer want to spend only on branding but they also ROI from those branding. We at Adobe have been quick to realize this change in the digital atmosphere and the proposed integration of Ad cloud DSP with the Experience Cloud is going to help brands achieve their desired performance on a much-enhanced scale.