Display ads

Hi again. This time I have come with another interesting topic which is display ads. After reading this blog I hope that all of you will have a better understanding about many aspects of the topic.

According to Wikipedia, “Display advertising is a type of advertising that typically contains text (i.e., copy), logos, photographs or other images, location maps, and similar items”. In digital marketing what we refer to as display ads is not the conventional billboards and posters we see. Mainly online banners are identified as Display ads in digital marketing. Generally this refers to image and video based ads which appear on your pages. Simply Display ads are the digital mode of advertising in the World Wide Web.

After creating an ad the advertiser does a placement targeting where he decides in which spaces he is going to display his ad. It can either be a whole website or a specific ad unit. To display this ad the advertiser doesn’t have to spend a penny. He will only have to pay when a visitor sees the ad and click on it. And that is also the measurement of ad reach because those clicks are counted as views of the ad.

There are many types of display ads which are categorized based on the medium it reaches the target. As the names imply, Google search ads and Bing ads are the ads appear on search engines where Facebook ads and Twitter ads are the ads appear on social media networks. And also there are YouTube ads, Gmail ads. Email ads, In-game ads as well.

Below listed are some examples for display ads.

•  Half Page (Tower) Ad

  

  Different types and sizes of online display ads

• Medium Rectangle Ad
• Roadblock Ad
• Home Page Takeover
• Sliding Billboard Ad
• Floating Ad
• Multimedia Pre-roll Ad
• Mobile Ad
• Email Ad
• Page Curl
• Tablet Slider Ad
• Tablet In-Story Ad

The above mentioned categories are created depending on the size of the ad, type of the file, types of animations displayed etc.

Marketers and advertisers have to remember that in advertising not only seeing the ad but also getting the correct message and ability of recalling is equally important.

In the future you all will experience totally different display advertising from today mainly because with the competition and information seeking customers, advertisers have to make their ads more creative, interactive, and attractive as well as informative which will drastically change the beliefs of the advertiser and the customer as well.. And most importantly, ads will convert to be seek out by the interested parties voluntarily rather than interrupting the customers by the advertisers.

Now Google has introduces new features to its users to review ads by options such as the new “show reviewed ads “checkbox in their review center as well as by adding the new “ad size “widget which allows the users to review the ads by their size.

There are many advantages for an advertiser for using Display ads on the digital mediums rather than in conventional media.

• It will help the advertisers to promote the company or the product directly to the target market by specifically reaching those customers.
• Since everything is going digital and everyone is becoming more and more comfortable using digital media, it can be identified as the best way to attract visitors to the web site.
• Comparatively it is lower cost since it can reach a large audience at once without having to incur additional physical costs.
• The ad creating sites and programs allow the advertiser to maintain very flexible budget since it provides options for setting daily budgets, monthly budgets etc.

If we talk about the trends in Digital display ads is that all the advertisers are moving from traditional banner ads to mobile ads because in the vicinity of digital technology, mobiles are becoming more powerful.

Pay Per Click Ads....

Today I will be presenting you a more informative blog on Pay Per Click ads in Digital Marketing. What do you think the meaning of the phrase “Pay per Click”? You guessed correctly. The name says it all. PPC stands for pay-per-click, a model of internet marketing. The first known first known and documented version of a PPC was included in a web directory called Planet Oasis in 1996. Each time the ad is clicked, the advertisers have to pay a fixed fee to the publisher of the advertisement who is usually a website owner. This can be identified as a method of buying visitors to your site since a cost should be incurred each time a visitor clicks on your ad. These websites generally charge a fixed price instead of a bidding price. These PPC ads are also known as “banner ads”. The calculation of the Pay Per Click is done by dividing the advertising cost by the number of clicks generated by an advertisement.

PPC is a very popular method used by modern e marketers because it allows the advertiser to pay some amount and place an ad in a sponsored link of a search engine when a visitor types a key word or words related to that site.

The main objective of using Pay Per Click ads is to increase the web traffic towards a website. These clicks can be used as a method to measure the attention an interest of the visitors to a site. Pay Per Clicks gives an idea about how effective the advertising was because we can calculate the number of clicks on the ads. If the aim of using an ad is to generate a click, Pay Per Click ads are the best mechanism to be used. If the ad is really good it will affect the click through rates and the succeeding Pay Per Clicks.

There are two models which are being used to determine Pay Per Click. 

• Flat-rate PPC

• Bid-based PPC

Flat-rate PPC

In this model both the parties i.e. the publisher and the advertiser agree a fixed rate and that amount will be paid time each time a visitor clicks on an ad. Based on the contents of these pages the amount can differ. If the content is very valuable, the PPC is high because it attracts more valuable customers than the sites which do not have attractive content. If the contract is long term, the advertisers can negotiate and agree to a lower rate. Sometimes the core of these content sites can be paid ads.

Bid-based PPC

This is the second method to be used to determine PPC. Unlike in fixed rate PPC, publisher allows the advertisers to compete against each other in a private auction hosted by most commonly in an advertising network.

Whenever a keyword query is made and it matches the advertiser’s key word list, the websites that use PPC will display advertisements relevant to that content. Those are generally known as sponsored ads or sponsored links.

The disadvantage of PPC advertising is even though advertisers invest tons of their money in these ads, this model is not protected from fraudulent clicks i.e. software programmed to click the ads, and this will mislead the advertiser because he will consider those clicks also when calculating hits.

But you have to remember this. Proper Management is the key to the success of anything. Even though PPC generates uncountable number of clicks to your ad with poor management, you will be ended up giving nothing g for the visitors. Therefore implementation as well as the proper management is equally important.

Search Engine Optimization

Whenever you hear the word “search engines” there are few specific brands and logos that come in to your mind. Google, Yahoo and bing are the three most popular search engines and according to various researches, the most commonly used and the most popular search engine is Google. 

When a person wants to find information about a product or a company, he/she types key words related to their search in these search engines. With the improvements in technology, within seconds those search engines produce millions of related search results but, only 10 ads are displayed in the first page. So, have you ever paid any attention to the fact that what is the reason behind this and how your site can be shown among those first 10 results, because as you all know, no one spends their time browsing through all the results pages. Therefore it is really important to get your sites among that 10.

There is a reason for only 10 sites to be appeared in the first page and that is called Search Engine Optimization. The strategies or the techniques that are used to increase the number of visitors to a website by obtaining a higher rank in the search result page of a search engine are generally known as Search Engine Optimization. 

To make this concept more clearly I am going to explain it in simpler terms. Just think of your website as a cake. According to Victoria Edwards, Your links, paid search, and social media acts as the icing, but your content, information architecture, content management system, and infrastructure act as the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash. Therefore you have to make sure that your website is properly designed in order to increase the traffic for your website.

There is a misconception to get a higher rank in search results  you have to pay the search engine. That is not true. Google does not charge anything from a website to rank it among the top results, unless if it is a paid ad. You just have to clearly understand what a search engine is looking for and meet those criterion.

Now I am going to talk about what exactly a search engine is looking for, from a website.

• Content: The texts, titles and descriptions are known as content.
• Performance: How fast your site is, is it up to date and does it function properly?
• Authority: How good is the content of your site and how often the other authoritative sites use your site?
• User Experience: How user friendly the design of your site is and how useful and the sufficient enough your content is?

You also have to consider some facts that you should not be doing when trying to carry out search engine optimization.

• Overuse of keywords on the page 
•  Poor user experience design: you should not include unnecessary ads because it makes it difficult for the user to grab the content he/ she wants

When a user enters a query, the machines search the index for matching pages and return the results it believes are the most relevant to the user. This relevancy is calculated using an algorithm which considers over 200 factors in determining the rank of the website.

Key Success Factors of SEO

1.Website crawl-ability
2.Keyword research
3.Site structure & KWD mapping
4.Content building and formatting
5.Page titles & Meta data
6.Use of images and videos
7.Internal linking structure / Navigation
8.URLs
9.Link popularity (Authority building)
10. Website maintenance
Source: Search Engine Marketing by Mr. Suranga Priyashantha
 
If you meet the above stated requirements at the same time stay away from the facts you should not be doing,  it is guaranteed that your site will be appeared among the top results without having to incur any financial cost.

Web designing and User Experience Design

Every day we browse through hundreds and thousands of websites but not all of them have the ability to make the user stay with the site and visit the site again and again. Did any of you stop to think about the reasons for this? Why only some specific sites stay in our minds and why we always prefer to use those sites among all the available sites. If you look at this matter in the customers’ perspective, you will realize that the main reason for the popularity of these sites is its interactive and user friendly design.

Even though consumers use the web sites mainly to collect information, information alone will not attract a customer. A site’s content, its information architecture, design and speed also matters a lot. Even though your site has all the information a customer needs, if its design is not user friendly and it gives a bad experience for the user, consumers won’t use it twice.

And also there is a huge misconception that the Design is all about the user which is not at all true. While meeting the customer requirements at the same time a great design helps the organization achieve its objectives as well.

Elements of User Experience Design

•  Visual design 
•  Information architecture 
•  Information
•  Structuring, organization, and labeling
•  Finding and managing

In Digital Marketing, user experience design is offered to the customer along with software developments and other applications developments. After researching about customer requirements, designers can create a site which meets those requirements. When designing the site, the designer has to make sure that the design is not too technical because everyone does not have the technical competence to use such a site and it will draw them away from your site and also improve the usability of the system. Therefore it is really important to have a great web design and a web experience because it can boost the visits to your website.

Today I’m going to talk about the web usability of elakiri.com, which has been named as the most popular entertainment website in Sri Lanka.

Source . http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Accessibility

1.  Site load‐time is reasonable – Is it is shown in the below picture; elakiri.com site is full of ads, videos and lots of other animations. Even though it increases the attractiveness of the site, it surely slows down the load time.

2.  Adequate text‐to‐background contrast – Top quarter of the site is full of pictures and animations and the remaining portion is filled with texts which are hard to read. But the space near those pictures and animations is empty.

3.  Font size/spacing is easy to read – Texts are too small and too much unused space at the top.

4.  Flash & add‐ons are used sparingly – Yes, Flash player is only required to watch music videos.

5.  Images have appropriate ALT tags – Images do not have ALT tags.

6.  Site has custom not‐found/404 page – Site does not have a 404 page.

Identity

7.  Company logo is prominently placed – Yes, the site name is in the top left hand corner of the site.

8.  Tagline makes company’s purpose clear – It’s not that clear because it only says “The largest Sri Lankan online community” which does not talk about its main purpose which is providing old and new songs in various formats.

9.  Home‐page is digestible in 5 seconds – Home page is filled with all the pictures, links, comments, related links so it takes some time to find the required fields.

10. Clear path to company information – No, there is no clear path to information.

11. Clear path to contact information - There is a “contact us” button in the home page but it only provides their email address.

Navigation

12. Main navigation is easily identifiable –Yes. A properly defined navigation tab is provided in at the top of the page.

13. Navigation labels are clear & concise -Yes

14. Number of buttons/links is reasonable – Yes. To every related area, there is a link in the home page.

15. Company logo is linked to home‐page - Yes

16. Links are consistent & easy to identify – They are easy to identify but the consistency is less.

17. Site search is easy to access - Yes

Content

18. Major headings are clear & descriptive    - Yes

19. Critical content is above the “fold” - Critical content is shown at the top of the page.

20. Styles & colors are consistent – Theme colours are blue and white and those colours are being used consistently.      

21. Emphasis (bold, etc.) is used sparingly - Headings are in bold letters.

22. Ads & pop‐ups are unobtrusive - Yes

23. Main copy is concise & explanatory - Yes

24. URLs are meaningful & user‐friendly - Yes. The URL is www.elakiri.com/

25. HTML page titles are explanatory     - Yes

If the answer for all the above 25 questions were Yes, it can be said that this site provides the best web usability and user experience designs to its users.