Display advertising is a key digital channel in which to promote your e-commerce business. Well-designed display ad can generate a lot of clicks, as well as build awareness for your brand.
In this blog, we suggest 5 important tips an e-commerce brand should consider when producing a display campaign. Including;
- Create HTML5 rich media display ads
- Use high-quality in-banner video
- Display your latest offers with dynamic content
- Stay relevant with moment marketing
- Serve the right display ads with retargeting
1. Create HTML5 rich media display ads
In the competitive field of e-commerce, it can be difficult to create advertising that stands out from the crowd. Ads that are static and lifeless will not grab the attention of consumers.
That is why HTML5 rich media advertising presents an attractive option to e-commerce marketers.Rich media is proven to increase display advertising performance by up to 267% according to AdRoll.
Rich media is defined as an ad that includes advanced features such as video, audio, or other interactive elements that encourage viewers to engage with the content. This can include anything from an in-banner search to a Spotify playlist – the possibilities are practically endless.
DC Thomson Media and Nova are great examples of brands who have leveraged rich media to create engaging and effective display advertising.
2. Use high-quality in-banner video
Video advertising has long been the priority for advertisers on social media and across other online formats. However, now it is starting to make headway as a primary format for display advertising too. In fact, it now makes up for one-fifth of all display advertising in Europe according to the IAB.
Georg Jensen is a great example of an e-commerce brand using video to great effect in their display ads. They have reported six times more engagement in their ads using video than those without.
In-banner video is a useful tool for capturing the attention of viewers and it’s simple to apply too. On a basic level, a video can be used as a background for a banner or more creatively, as part of an animation. For instance, maybe a trailer that ends with a call-to-action (CTA) frame.
For e-commerce, it also presents exciting opportunities for retargeting too. Dynamic video offers advertisers the possibility to remarket by displaying previously viewed products or services programmatically (more on dynamic creative coming up next).
To read more on video display advertising, read our best practice guide here.
3. Display your latest offers with dynamic content
Dynamic content allows your brand to serve a range of different content elements directly to your customers. In practice, this essentially means using live data feeds in your display ads to showcase chosen products or offers.
What’s more, if you use dynamic content powered by data feeds you can show specific copy and/or ad creative to different consumers. For example, geolocation data can be used to inform a data feed, which then shows specific offers – live and in-banner – based on a consumer’s location.
Dynamic content helps to make your e-commerce display advertising engaging and relevant. And not all brands are using it! According to Bannerflow research, 87% of European display advertisers have yet to take advantage of dynamic ads.
What makes the use of dynamic content and data feeds easy for e-commerce brands is the ease to create and control via a creative management platform (CMP). All you need to do is connect a data feed to a master creative and that’s it! This will then show the products or offers you want displayed across all ad sizes and variants of a display campaign.
Read more about applying dynamic creative to your campaigns here.
4. Stay relevant with moment marketing
Being reactive and of the moment allows you to stay ahead of the competition in e-commerce. This doesn’t just mean reacting to a competitor’s latest offer either – it can mean interacting with events affecting the outside world. For example, the weather!
If you create campaigns that embrace the moment and cater to current events you’re far more likely to reach your target audience. Which is why moment marketing is such a dominant feature of modern campaigns.
For example, a Bannerflow study on display advertising data during the FIFA World Cup saw both impressions and clicks for display ads rise significantly during the tournament. Why? Well, one of the reasons for the rise was the increased use of messaging that reacted to events during the tournament. Relevant advertising works.
Yet, how can you achieve this relevancy? Using creative management platforms is a way to stay relevant and align campaign messaging to current events. Thanks to real-time publishing and the control of a CMP, you can change the messaging or offer of an entire campaign instantly across markets and formats. This is exactly what Nordic telecom brand Three Sweden does.
5. Serve the right display ads with retargeting
Display advertising offers the opportunity to reach your potential customers throughout their entire sales journey. From the top to the bottom of the funnel, advanced display advertising can encourage users to complete the desired action far more than a standard banner ad.
At a basic level, e-commerce marketers can retarget users with products left in their checkout basket with a simple retargeting pixel placed on the checkout page of their website.
For more advanced users, decision tree targeting or dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) offers the possibility to show specific creative, messaging and CTAs to each viewer. It’s all about using data to personalise your advertising.
For Lara Formosa, Digital Creative Specialist at Casumo, DCO is an integral part of their digital marketing strategy: “We strive towards personalisation in our ads. Therefore, we produce hundreds of creatives to target different markets, at different stages of the customer journey.”
In fact, according to a CMO Council and Deloitte report from 2018, 44% of senior marketing leaders worldwide believe that DCO will shape their company’s growth in the future.
This is an area for huge expansion in the e-commerce market and offers endless possibilities for retargeting and reaching the right viewer, with the right ad, at the right time.
Read the full blog here to learn more about how DCO could work for your brand.
Next steps
In order to produce successful e-commerce campaigns, it’s crucial your marketing team has access to the best ad tech.
A creative management platform (CMP) such as Bannerflow enables in-house teams to produce powerful and effective display advertising. Apply for demo today if you would like to find out more about a CMP can help your e-commerce business.
