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Google Display ads agency

Broaden your reach

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The beauty of Display Ads lies in their power to reach a new, relevant audience and increase your brand awareness… assuming you’re working with a Display Advertising agency that knows what it’s doing, of course.

To master ad displays, you first need to understand what other websites your users visit and what messaging and visuals they’ll find compelling. Use this data to build an effective display ad campaign and you could grow your audience, increase your website traffic and ultimately get more conversions. That’s money. In your pocket.

If you want to find out more about our Display Advertising services, give us a call.

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What is Display Advertising?

So, what are Display Ads? Display Advertising is a type of online advertising where ads are displayed on other websites that allow ad slots to be placed around their content. These visual advertisements take many forms, including banner, pop-up and interstitial ads, and are typically placed on websites that are relevant to the products or services being advertised. Think of them as billboards for the internet.

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Our Display Advertising services

With over 60 years of combined PPC experience, our elites know how to create Display Ads that draw the eye and get people clicking. Our Display Advertising services include:

Auditing – We like to know what we’re dealing with. We look at how effectively your Display Ads have worked so far and what we can do to improve on that in line with your business objectives.

Planning – The fun begins. We develop a strategy that will help you reach your goals, offering insights on the best places to host your ad displays to reach your target audience and what format they should be in to drive as many clicks as possible.

Creating – We combine your image assets and creatives with our recommended text assets, feed that to Google, which automatically create responsive ad displays.

Testing – Any Display Advertising agency worth its salt will track the effectiveness of its campaigns to check that its having the intended effect and is reaching the right people. We test and trial – endlessly.

Adjusting – The more data we have, the better we can assess what works and what doesn’t. We always let the numbers dictate what tweaks should be made to a campaign to maximise results. Yep, we’re all about making you that money.

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Types of Display Ads

Advertising displays come in many formats, but these are the most popular ones:

  • Static: A single, unmoving image, generally accompanied by text. You can find all of the possible image dimensions for static display ads here
  • Animated: Uses 5-10 seconds of looping video or GIF
  • Interactive: Requires engagement from the viewer, such as answering a survey, playing a short game, or entering personal information
  • Video: Use self-contained videos to get the messages across. Unlike animated Display Ads, which only have a few seconds of footage, video ads are longer, though typically not longer than 30 seconds
  • Expanding: Appear small at first and get bigger when the user performs a certain interaction, like clicking or scrolling the mouse cursor over them
  • Responsive: Automatically adjust its size, appearance and format to fit the available ad space. All you need to do is provide the required text assets along with 1:1 and 1.9:1 ratio images, then all the different ad creatives will automatically be produced from these assets
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What’s the key benefit of Responsive Display Ads?

Responsive Display Ads are designed to be flexible and adaptable, allowing them to be displayed effectively on a variety of devices and screen sizes. We often find that responsive ad displays outperform static-based ones, as Google prefers the flexibility of adjusting assets to fit any size ad slot possible.

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Display Ads example

Before choosing which Display Advertising agency to work with, it’s worth asking to see their portfolio.

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Forget sleepless nights trying to understand how ad displays work and, instead, leave the grunt work to us. An experienced Display Advertising agency, we’ve unlocked the secrets to success and we’re here to use them on your behalf.

Talk to us

How does Display Advertising work?

Targeting for display boils down to two main categories:

  1. Who people are
  2. Where they are on the internet at that time
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Who they are

Google is able to get a scarily accurate idea of who you are based on your previous web activity. Sometimes this data may be freely given (e.g by entering your age and gender into your Google account), but often Google can figure this out based on sites you’ve visited before.

The main targeting methods in the sub-category are:

  • Demographics: Simple ones like age and gender categories, as well as detailed ones like parental status, education level, homeowner status, etc.
  • Affinity interest: These are interests that people might list on their bio. At any one point, someone might be interested in buying sealant for a particular DIY project. However, they’re unlikely to write on their Tinder profile “Hi, I’m Jeff, and I am interested in buying white sealant” (if they do, probably best to run a mile). But “DIY projects” might be something that they see as a hobby, and so that would be the affinity interest that could be targeted
  • In-market audiences: These are the flip-side of affinity, and represent short-term “interests” based on recent browser activity. Expect these to be more specific. Target these around your exact offering
  • Remarketing: This is a category all of its own in advertising displays. It allows you to target audiences based on whether they have been to your site before. Find out more about remarketing here
  • Customer match: A powerful targeting tool that allows you to target email lists of your own creation. Lists must be over 1000 in size for privacy reasons

Where they are

These are ultimately categorisations of the site that a user is on at the time the ad could show. The main targeting methods in the sub-category are:

  • Placements: These are the specific websites you want to target. If you have the time to cherry pick each individual site, then you can go very targeted on each. This results in a high degree of control
  • Topic: These are Google’s own categorisations of all the placements available. They contain thousands of different websites that you can target. These are a good option if you are doing initial research and don’t already know exactly which placements to target
  • Keyword contextual: Not to be confused with search based keywords – they work very differently! This method allows you to effectively create your own categorisations of placements by building up a thematic list of keywords that would match the site content of all the websites you’d like to target. It gives you more control than the topics, but building up a good keyword list can be a lot of trial and error
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3 Benefits of Display Advertising

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Reach a wider audience

Advertising displays allow businesses to reach a large, diverse and – most importantly – relevant audience, as ads can be displayed on a variety of websites and apps that are relevant to the products or services offered in the ad. This can be particularly effective for businesses looking to increase brand awareness or reach new customers.

Improve brand visibility

It seems obvious, but the more people you reach, the more awareness you raise. This can help increase brand recognition and can lead to increased traffic and sales through direct and branded organic channels.

Target specific demographics

Advertising displays can be targeted to specific audiences based on location, demographics, interests and browsing history. This allows businesses to reach their target audience more effectively than traditional billboards or TV adverts, and increase the likelihood of success.

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Google Display Ads vs Search Ads: What’s the difference?

Unlike Search Ads that appear on search result pages, Display Advertising is hosted on other websites. So, while Search is intent based (people have to actively demonstrate an interest by entering a search query), Display Ads reach a much colder audience that is higher up the funnel.

Think of it like this: Search advertising represents a car salesman in the showroom – the potential customer will have already had to demonstrate intent by walking in. Display Advertising is a person handing out leaflets outside the showroom, trying to tempt people to come in. They are naturally trying to work with a colder audience.

Display also offers more flexibility on bidding. Whereas, Search is primarily a cost-per-click model, Display can work on cost-per-click, but also on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model.

The main pitfalls to avoid are combining Search and Display together in one campaign. They are fundamentally different, if you want good results from them, they must be split out. We work primarily on the Google Display Network (GDN) as it offers over 90% of placement reach.

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Is Display Advertising effective?

Done right, an Ad Display can be a really effective tool for increasing brand awareness and reaching new potential customers – but you’ll need the right Display Advertising agency by your side.

Importantly though, as Display is more top of the funnel, we should measure success for it differently than Search. Going back to our analogy, you wouldn’t ever expect the leaflet peddler to sell as many cars directly as the car salesman. Instead, you’d assess their performance based on how many people they brought into the store.

Looking at metrics such as reach/frequency, impressions, visitors who returned after viewing the ads and engagement rates, to assess their performance in the wider picture.

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How Dark Horse can help

Bragging isn’t in our nature but we’ll make an exception. We hire only the best in the business which means our Display Advertising services aren’t just the best in Manchester but the entire North West. If ad displays are done right they can drive a lot of potential leads to your site. Let us do the hard work for you and line your pockets.

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