Measuring Display Banner Ads Performance – Google Campaign Insight

Display Ads were among the first form of online advertising. Since marketers started utilizing Internet as a platform for promoting their products/services, banner advertising became popular. The rational was that if they can target websites that attract the same audience as theirs, they can reach their target market through contextual advertising.

Banner ads have been traditionally priced on a CPM model. However, as visitors got more and more exposed to banner ads, they started developing banner blindness. As a result banner ads click-through rates (CTR) have been in decline. Low CTR rates on banner ads together with their CPM pricing models and traditionally low conversion rates has made them less attractive for direct marketers. Nevertheless, display advertising has been a popular choice for brand marketers as they have been able to benefit from the brand exposure banner ads generated for their brands.

With the market slowdown in the recent years, marketers have been urged to be more careful with their marketing dollars. As a result we were seeing a decline in the growth of web banner advertising as their effectiveness was under question.

When AdWords introduced Placement Targeting advertising, Google started changing the name of the game. There were two main benefits to Placement Targeting.

First, as an advertiser, you do not have to just stick to ad networks and commit yourself to the buy with no exact knowledge of where your ads were showing up and not being able to pull out of a site if it was not performing well for you. With Placement Targeting advertising, you can start with a small budget, hand pick the sites you would like your ads to show up on, monitor their performance, adjust your bids to control your exposure and stop running ads on websites that are not performing well.

Secondly, you do not have to stick to the CPM pricing model anymore as Google AdWords allows you run ads in AdSense content network on a CPC basis very much like search network. Running banner ads on a CPC model has made banner advertising much more cost effective. You can get a large number of impressions at a very low cost.

Of course there are some limitations to running Placement Targeting ads. You might not be able to get prominent ad placements on your favourite sites. The benefits ripped from CPC banner advertising by marketers is coming at the expense of web publishers as they see their ad revenue potentials are in decline on the Internet as more advertisers move to more cost effective CPC pricing model.

With more talks about the attribution models and the impact of display advertising on search engine marketing campaigns; it seems that banner advertising is getting a boost again. After acquiring DoubleClick, Google seems to push out various tools which help pump new blood into the display advertising industry.

Traditionally AdWords was providing conversion tracking based on the clicks on the banners. By introducing View-through conversion reporting, Google provided advertisers with the ability to track the indirect impact of banner ads.

Impact of Display Ads on Search Engine Marketing

Campaign Insights can provide data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness in a particular product or service. It looks beyond the traditional measures of clicks and conversions to calculate the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits that result from a display ad campaign.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing • PPC Advertising