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The world of online marketing can seem like it has a language of its own, with many terms that describe different types of advertising being used interchangeably. If all digital ads must be displayed on one device or another, what differentiates display ads other online ads?
Display ads, also known as banner ads, are visual ads that appear on a website or within a mobile app. In their simplest form, they are composed of an image, messaging, and brand messaging or a logo.
Display advertising can include animation, video, or audio. The most complex examples can expand or include interactive elements. For example, an animated display ad could expand to play a video. Display advertising comes in many sizes—some run on both desktop and mobile environments, while others can only run on one or the other.
Display advertising is highly flexible in terms of content—with so many options, it’s important to be sure your message is tailored to the audience you are targeting. Display ads are known to be an effective tool for raising brand awareness and driving site traffic, but can also be an integral part of any campaign.
Many of the display ads you see online are trafficked through an agency-side Ad Server, or a platform used to house display ads and the instructions for serving them. They allow you to set-up creative rotations and apply targeting parameters that determine who will see your digital ads.
Ad servers also house tracking tags (or pixels) that are placed on client websites to track campaign performance. They are incredibly useful as a centralized data source for campaign performance information across all elements of a multi-faceted campaign.
Advertisers rely on their reporting capabilities to monitor every aspect of the campaign, rather than having to depend solely on publishers for critical insights that inform their decision-making around how they reach the target audience.
Basis DSP is compatible with most ad servers—and Basis platform can help automate the ad server setup process via an API connection to ad servers such as Google Campaign Manager or Sizmek.
Learn more about Display Advertising with Centro.
In the Breakthrough 2020 webinar series, Centro features clients who have gotten creative in times of uncertainty. Our guests share the challenges they’ve faced, the tough calls they’ve made, and how it’s all played out against the backdrop of 2020.
These stories will show how leaders are expanding their services, winning new business, adopting automated processes, realizing the benefits of remote working, and more.
Part 1 features Matt Wilson, President/COO of Eastport Holdings, who shares how his agency network responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with focus and strategy to come out stronger.
The fundamental purpose of marketing intelligence involves analyzing all relevant internal and external data sources related to the marketing efforts and performance of a business and then using these insights to inform future strategic decisions. The majority of businesses track their marketing efforts using analytics tools and attribution strategies, yet few are tapping into the full breadth of insights marketing intelligence can provide.
Most marketers today still consider marketing intelligence to be an advanced tactic reserved only for enterprise businesses. However, while the technology may indeed be more sophisticated than most, it’s also quickly become an essential tool for just about any business that is looking to expose granular insights and boost ROI. Here’s why:
Omnichannel marketing is a must
There are undoubtedly more marketing channels than ever before. Aside from traditional offline channels, there are now numerous social engagement providers, advertising publishers, mobile analytics portals, and call tracking technologies, etc. There are also too many content formats to count and different device types to optimize for.
Marketers need to reach audiences across numerous relevant channels with a consistent message to move them down the sales funnel. Businesses that adopt an omnichannel marketing strategy have 91% greater year-over-year retention rates compared to businesses that don’t. The only way to effectively market across various channels is by using sophisticated automation tools that offer deep insights into which channels perform the best.
Competition is getting steeper
The global economy has made competition online tougher than ever. A decade ago many businesses only competed with regional or national markets. Now they have competition from eCommerce and service companies across the world, including Europe, China, and other emerging economies.
Today, it’s simply not enough to monitor local competitor tactics to inform your marketing decisions. You need to pay attention to the global landscape and adjust your strategy to earn your share of visibility online. This massive undertaking could easily become the full-time job of any data scientist. Marketing intelligence platforms offer an automated solution to optimize advertising efforts based on the latest market trends, including changes in competitor bid strategy and investment.
There’s too much data
With the exponential growth of marketing channels comes a significant increase in meaningful consumer data businesses can derive insights from. The sheer volume of data available to businesses now has grown exponentially throughout the past decade and a half.
At the most basic level, there are relevant signals from every social platform, website behavioral data, search engine performance data, email engagement data, and more. Third-party platforms can also offer valuable audience behavioral insights around the web, helping marketers identify if they’re in-market or not. New technologies have also made it possible to monitor location-based data to give insights for brick-and-mortar businesses.
Businesses that take full advantage of all the data at their disposal to inform their marketing strategy can outperform the competition even with a smaller budget. The more that businesses adopt this strategy, the more essential marketing intelligence platforms become.
Marketing is more complex
All the above factors combined make for a much more complex marketing scenario than five or 10 years ago. Increased data equals more potential insights, which is a good thing, but a great number of marketers don’t have the capacity or the tools to make it work for them. Meanwhile, higher competition and heightened consumer expectations relating to brand experience together mean that marketers must start taking advantage of relevant technologies to make it all happen.
Here are some key features the most effective marketing intelligence platforms have:
Data unification capabilities
If your marketing intelligence platform is going to tap into the wealth of data available, it needs to have key functionalities that make it easy for you to collect, consolidate, and analyze it in one central location. This means integrating with all your marketing technology vendors and common data sources, while marketing landscape data and other relevant information from third-party tools should also be incorporated. Once aggregated, all data types should be standardized into a format that can be easily processed.
A marketing intelligence platform should not only unify all relevant data but also perform quality control assessments. When relying on automated processes to make key marketing decisions, it’s important to know the technology can flag data quality issues just like a marketing manager would.
Sophisticated Attribution
Data analysis on a massive scale is only valuable if you can accurately and effectively attribute key audience behaviors back to the channels and content that moved them down the sales funnel. A marketing intelligence platform should be able to track and interpret the value of key behaviors like purchases, repeat purchases, app installs, and other factors that might have led people there.
Marketing intelligence platforms should also have the flexibility to allow marketers to use whichever attribution model makes the most sense for their business, including first and last-touch, as well as multi-touch with a customized value attributed to different steps in the sales funnel.
Actionable Insights
There are many marketing analytics tools out there that can aggregate all your relevant data. However, they often leave it up to marketers themselves to run analyses and derive insights. A sophisticated marketing intelligence platform can utilize machine learning capabilities to provide some insights for you. This is really valuable because they can find correlations between seemingly unrelated data sets, unlocking actionable insights that would have otherwise gone undetected.
Your technology should also have forecasting capabilities so you can predict future performance based on current data insights and trends from historical performance data. This way you can plan out your budget and expected returns to fit how things will actually play out each year.
Intelligent Automation Processes
Unified data analysis means gaining more relevant insights than ever before. These insights are only valuable, though, if they inform changes in your marketing strategy, not just when starting a new campaign, but also as micro-adjustments throughout it. That’s why a marketing intelligence platform with integrated automation capabilities is essential.
Another key to unlocking the highest potential ROI from your data insights is real-time data analysis capabilities. Market landscape and performance data change daily - you should be able to discover key insights from the latest pertinent data, then automate adjustments in your campaign to quickly take advantage of new insights.
A few years ago marketing intelligence platforms seemed like an advanced option for the most sophisticated performance marketers. However, the wealth of data available today and the new competitive landscape have changed that entirely. If brick-and-mortar businesses don’t start taking full advantage of location data to drive their marketing strategy, their local competitors will. If a Europe-based eCommerce company doesn’t optimize its search ad bids to minimize necessary spend to reach its goals, competitors in Asia will.
Now is the time for businesses of all shapes and sizes to seriously consider investing in a marketing intelligence platform. If they don’t, it will soon become impossible to keep up with competitors who are. The good news is, marketing intelligence is one investment that is sure to bring a huge return, as long as you choose and apply the right platform.
Working remotely does not necessarily mean you have to lose productivity or team collaboration.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, Centro employees, along with thousands of our software users, and so many others, were thrown for a loop and day-to-day business operations were turned upside down.
As a result, we have all found ourselves navigating new ways of working—colleague and customer partnerships became virtual overnight, and video calls, no longer an exception, but a norm.
For us in the advertising industry, this meant that the typical weekly status meetings, usually held in conference rooms across the country, or team catch-ups over coffee, were now no longer possible. However, all is not lost! Access to the right tools and resources to streamline workflow and facilitate cross-team collaboration can help your team stay effective while working remotely.
Basis, Centro’s software to automate and consolidate digital operations across programmatic, direct, search and social, was built with collaboration and efficiency as key tenets. Over the past few months, we have experienced the benefit of utilizing Basis first-hand, within our own 300-person, geographically dispersed services team, and have witnessed the positive impact first-hand. We also surveyed our customers in late March, and 95% of them said Basis “has improved their ability to work remotely” with 49% stating it “has significantly improved their ability to work remotely.”
No office? No problem!
There are numerous tools within Basis to streamline communication and workflow, making it notably easier to run to an agency and manage disparate media teams, no matter where you are.
The primary junction for all negotiations and communications within Basis, this tool keeps internal and external correspondence organized in one place. It’s a powerful resource, critical to maintaining and organizing planning and campaign information, including current and past messages. The Collaboration Center makes it easy to catch-up quickly and avoid miscommunication between teams, all while saving time. Click here to watch a demo.
Basis helps users optimize and prioritize their work. The dashboard makes it easy to highlight client and campaign activities by directing the user’s attention to proposals, insertion orders, line item pacing, campaign KPIs, and comments from partners and clients, and so much more. Click here to watch a demo.
Basis makes collaboration actionable and timely through the comments and notes feature. Users can create comments and notes for themselves or team members within the platform. This time-saving functionality directs individuals’ attention to comments specifically relevant to them for each campaign. Click here to watch a demo.
Basis offers helpful and time-saving optimization recommendations. Algorithmic optimization evaluates historical performance of inventory and will adjust bids accordingly based on that performance. Machine learning optimization analyzes multiple targeting parameters and finds the combination of factors with a high probability of achieving the campaign KPIs. Click here to watch a demo.
Basis enables a holistic view of all digital campaigns, making it easy to identify opportunities to adjust ad spending across campaigns and specific channels. As campaign performance unfolds, shifting budgets to maximize performance against KPIs has never been easier. Click here to watch a demo.
New Tools to Come
And there’s more. Users asked—and we listened. We heard our users’ feedback about what could help them the most—and as a result, we re-prioritized our product roadmap to develop something unique to help our customers manage their media operations workflow while working remotely. Details are coming soon, so stay tuned, and check our social handles for updates.
When thousands of Basis users go remote, we meet them where they are. Working remotely doesn’t mean you have to work harder—work smarter, with Basis. Increase your productivity and team collaboration today! Learn more here.
To enhance standard ads, Google allows marketers to add contextually rich information about a business, product, or service when their ad appears in search results.
Ad extensions can be a quick and easy way to enhance a call to action, add immediacy, and improve conversion, by reducing the number of steps for the customer.
Below are some sample applications of Google Ad extensions:
Include relevant price information for your product or service. Users can link to specific products relevant to their ad.
Add a phone number so customers can easily call your business. For mobile-focused campaigns, this can improve performance as users can convert with a simple tap.
Prompt users to submit customer lead information directly inside of the ad.
Display specific, contextually relevant pages from your website.
Include descriptive text about your product or service, such as “Free Shipping” or other information relevant to your ad.
Provide users with an immediate preview of your product and services by including brief descriptions from text on your website.
Include relevant business information, such as address and store hours.
Display affiliated locations including nearby shops where your product is sold.
Encourage users to download your company’s mobile app.
Showing promotional sales and offers inspires the user to learn more about the product or service advertised in your ad.
Google allows users to report on performance with and without ad extensions, so you can test and evaluate which ads are performing and how extensions are helping to drive campaign success. Google also allows users to enable automated extensions, which use algorithms to generate copy, location, phone numbers and other details dynamically from your website.
Learn more about Display Advertising with Centro.
I’ve had the pleasure of working from home with my husband for several years. The honeymoon phase of spending 24/7/365 together certainly ebbs and flows, but through trial and error, we've found many ways to optimize our "working" relationship.
Here are my five top tips for coworking with a partner:
1. Take turns making lunch
This prevents you from wasting an hour every day asking, “What do we want to eat?” Meanwhile, it feels luxurious on the days your partner makes the meal.
Alternatively, trade off tasks instead of days—for example, one of you cleans and the other makes meals.
2. Show each other your work
Ask for some help on something or show off a new project. It’s amazing how much better your work gets when you have a second set of eyes. Even if it’s just “Can you read this email before I send it?”
And, learn about your partner’s job! It’s shocking how many couples know almost nothing about how their partner spends most of their time. Even if it’s just “What does that acronym you said on that call mean?” Apparently all I say everyday is KPI, CPM, and ROI…
3. Have clear boundaries
Ask before you interrupt and don’t get mad if your partner is busy. Set some clear boundaries like, “When my headphones are on I can’t talk.”
It's also helpful to have a clear boundary activity between working and not working. Even if it’s just “We’ll go for a walk at 6pm.” Otherwise you never really stop working.
4. Plan some post-isolation fun stuff
Start planning a few things you can’t do right now that you’ll do afterwards. Even if it’s just a big dinner or a road trip. Give yourselves something exciting to look forward to.
5. Don't forget the small stuff:
Interested in joining our team? Check out our careers page.
If there’s one thing that sets a marketer apart from the rest, it’s the ability to take complex data and present it in a visual, customized, and comprehensible way. Now, through a proprietary connector, Basis passes planning and delivery data to Looker Studio so users can create branded, tailored, and interactive dashboards.
With this tool, you can provide stakeholders with access to real-time information and easily showcase your campaign’s success. Here's how:
After logging into Looker Studio with your Google account, click here to reach Basis’ connector. Then, authorize both platforms to exchange information.
Once you’ve completed this one-time setup you can select the client and brand you'll be working with.
The dashboard will begin as a blank canvas, which you can personalize with different fonts, themes, and colors.
Looker Studio has the drag-and-drop design interface of PowerPoint, and the charting capabilities of Excel. Additional options include graphs, charts, maps, calendars, images, logos, and more.
We know that starting from zero can seem overwhelming, so we’ve put together a starter template for our users! The template includes a sample report you can leverage to tell the story of your campaigns—plus, we’ve left some notes to guide you through the process.
Now that you’ve completed your dashboard, it’s time to share your data. There are many sharing options: You can invite people to view or edit reports, schedule emails to display reports, post them on your website or social media, or download them as PDFs.
The best part? There are no additional charges to use this service. Start connecting, visualizing, and sharing your data today!
Connect with us to learn more about this and other enhancements we’ve added to Basis this spring.
The difference between ordering a small desert and a small dessert could impact your dining experience.
You partner may reject your marriage proposal if you give them a wring, instead of a ring.
In short, a misplaced word or extra character holds a lot of power!
What happens when your organization’s data contains typos? A ripple effect of errors, as many of us know all too well.
Basis includes a naming convention feature to solve for this issue. Basis users store their company’s nomenclature as formulas, and quickly apply them to line items to create harmonized records. The feature accelerates processes and prevents undesired outcomes resulting from misspelled words.
Your company’s data is one of its most valuable assets! Ensuring that it’s properly logged allows you to:
Automating processes and generating efficiencies across your campaigns, team, and business is at the core of what we do. Learn more about how Basis can help your business! Connect with us today.
The time has come, and it is long overdue. We need to retire using click-through rates (CTR) as a performance metric that defines success on digital display advertising or social campaigns. Sure, it served us well in the early days of digital advertising as a reliable metric we could count on. But now? Let's make digital media meaningful and say goodbye to CTR being the sole measure of success.
As the digital display advertising landscape has become more complex, CTR falls short in connecting the dots and driving results. Many channels and tactics come into play with campaign execution, and CTR is rarely going to provide the most meaningful results towards an agency or brand's overall business objectives.
Ask yourself: what meaning has come from CTR recently? If site traffic is the ONLY goal you care about as an outcome from digital display advertising, then consider moving to a Landing Page View (LPV) goal. This can help bridge the gap between driving site traffic and a user’s time spent on a page. Facebook pushed for this shift from CTR to Landing Page Views in 2018 to combat “clicky” behavior from users and drive more meaningful and efficient performance. Centro quickly adopted this best practice and saw very strong results across many verticals.
If you are looking to move drive stronger results for your brand, then let's all agree to put CTR away. Instead, focus on getting those pixels placed!
Laying out a clear and concise pixel strategy by identifying key actions on the site to track, and ultimately, the most valuable or final action a user can take, provides the opportunity for far more actionable insight for all display advertising campaigns. Not only will you be able to understand true efficiency against media dollars in getting a user to act or convert, but this also creates more clarity around the customer journey.
Here is where the meaning comes in. By understanding your audience's path to conversion, more measurement and analytic solutions arise. From implementing a DMP strategy – to the use of attribution modeling, to testing new creative messaging—all these opportunities and more, can now come into play.
Based on current global, economic, and cultural conditions for the foreseeable future—meaningful approaches to support digital media and display advertising efforts should pay off in the long-run. This time has forced many advertisers to pause, reflect, and reframe their messaging. It is an opportune period to find ways to be precise, deliberate, thoughtful, and thorough in digital media and display advertising executions.
Centro is here to help navigate these difficult times. We highly recommend tuning into Centro’s most recent webinars about Industries in Flux: Advertising Through Crisis and Industries in Flux: State of QSR’s. We also recommend checking out a recent blog post about How COVID-19 is Changing Media Consumption and the most recent Digital Innovations Awesome List, which compiles the latest trade pubs and trends.
As we face a new frontier in every facet of our lives, let us reflect and act on moving digital media into having a positive and meaningful impact in the future. Trust us when we say: the future is free of CTR.