What are the types of paid visibility in digital advertising?
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing, better known by the abbreviation SEM, is a form of digital advertising that utilizes a budget to display your website at the very top of search engine results pages.
Google and Bing! Both sell ad space above organic search results to companies looking for increased visibility. Search Engine Marketing allows for keyword and audience targeting.
The recommended ad spend budget for search engine marketing campaigns can rely on several factors such as:
- Campaign Length
- Size of Target Market
- Location of Target Market
- Competition Present in the Industry of the Target Market
- And much more.
Let’s take a deeper look at exactly what search engine marketing is, and why it is still one of the most effective digital advertising strategies.
Why Should You Run SEM Campaigns?
As stated above, Search Engine Marketing allows businesses to buy the first few listings above the organic search results on Google and Bing!.
“What about search engine optimization?”, you might ask. Well, search engine marketing certainly doesn’t replace SEO, but for many companies, it is a much more viable option.
Search Engine Optimization can be incredibly competitive, especially in larger markets. It requires months of constant work to build up a competitive enough backlink profile, especially when a company is new to the industry they are advertising in.
More so, ranking in a highly competitive market for search terms requires a properly built, updated, and constantly maintained website. Some companies do not have the budget to create a new website and want to start advertising and gaining visibility. This is the perfect time to run SEM.
More so, search engine marketing is always an excellent option to supplement SEO campaigns. Having your business listed at the top of search engine results pages whether organic or paid, always creates an impression that leads to visits and conversions.
How We Do SEM
Google vs. Bing SEM
Search Engine Marketing is set up and run through dashboards provided by Google or Bing!. Deciding on which search engine to run a marketing campaign on can be tricky. It all comes down to targeting the right audience.
While many agencies might entirely ignore Bing! as a viable option considering Google has a dominant market share, we have found some shocking results from not ignoring the opportunity to run Bing! ads. Understanding the behavior of your target audience is crucial to deciding where to run SEM campaigns and how much of a budget to allocate to different search engines.
At GriffinWink, we have years of experience and over 25 certifications in search engine marketing. You can rest assured that your next campaign will be a success with our team behind the wheel.
Keyword Analysis
Keywords and Keyphrases are easily one of the most important aspects of designing a search engine marketing campaign. In the past, Google referred to its Ads dashboard as Adwords. This is because companies (or agencies) decide which words they want to trigger their SEM ads.
Then, when your ad is displayed, if the search user clicks through to their website, you are charged a price determined from the Google algorithm. This is where the term Pay-Per-Click comes from, but we will dive deeper into that shortly.
So what determines if your ad is displayed instead of your competition’s ads when a term is searched? Several factors actually decide on who gets displayed and when. These include how your ad is performing when it is displayed, or quality score, the content on the page you are sending users to, the structure of your ad, and a few other factors as well.
Understanding keyword and keyphrase strategy can literally make or break your campaign. While the dashboards of Google and Bing! are helpful to new users, the strategy in search engine marketing is complex and deep. Our talented team of digital advertising specialists knows how to conduct proper keyword research whether you are running campaigns at a local or international level.
What Does PPC Mean?
In the world of SEM, you will commonly hear another acronym – PPC. PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click, and it has a lot to do with how you are billed for search engine marketing campaigns.
We briefly mentioned above that you only use your budget when a search engine user actually clicks on your ad. This helps make sure that your search engine marketing ads are fully optimized.
When an ad is performing well, its budget is used quickly. When an ad does not perform well, it is less likely to be displayed. This is because Google wants to deliver the highest level of service for those using its search engine, and when users routinely click on an SEM ad, it signals to Google that it is worth displaying more often.
Real-Time Evaluation
Since search engine marketing runs off of a PPC design, it gives us the potential to see which ads are performing well, and which are struggling. This real-time evaluation of analytics allows us to make changes throughout a campaign as it’s running.
Evaluating campaigns as they end is no longer enough to demonstrate ROI. With GriffinWink, we constantly monitor your SEM campaigns and make tweaks and adjustments in real-time to create unbelievable results.
Google Local Services
Google recently launched a new pay-per-lead service for select markets and select industries. This new service is called Google Local Services and allows businesses to be “Google Guaranteed”.
In order to have the “Google Guaranteed” stamp of approval and be able to take advantage of Local Services, businesses must pass a screening process. This process includes verification of licenses, insurances, and third party employee background checks for any employees that will serve clients at their homes.
Customers benefit from using a Google Guaranteed company as they receive a satisfaction guarantee. Google covers claims up to the invoice amount, with a lifetime cap of $2,000.
Where And How Ads Appear
Local Services ads take priority above other Google advertisements. This means if your company is Google Guaranteed and runs Local Services ads, they appear above both the map 3-pack and the AdWords results.
In these Local Services ads, companies can display their name, review rating, city, phone number and hours. The number of paid listings in different industries varies greatly by region. It is a good rule of thumb to remember that the larger the metro-area your business is in, the more competition a Local Services ad will need to compete with.
Are Local Services Ads Worth The Set-Up Process?
While the set-up process for Local Services ads can be time-consuming, it is absolutely worth it. For many markets, Local Services is a very new feature for businesses to take advantage of, and for this reason, many companies are seeing enormous returns from getting in on the ground floor.
To learn more about the setup process of Local Services, and to get started on this exciting new opportunity, contact us today.
Display Advertising
Display Advertising is another type of digital advertising. Display Advertising allows you to place visual ads on different websites across the internet. Display ads are a great way to promote new products or offer new promotions.
While Display ads work in a similar way to search engine ads, there are some unique differences that are worth understanding fully. While display ads commonly have an excellent conversion rate, creating an effective campaign takes in-depth strategy and a high level of research.
What Is Display Advertising: Breaking Down The Basics
As noted above, display advertisements allow you to advertise on different websites, sometimes even competitor sites, with visual ads. These ads commonly come in a few different sizes and are placed in different areas around a webpage.
Banner Ads
Banner ads are a form of display ads that are long, and not tall. They are commonly placed at the top of a web page.
Some websites keep their banner space to themselves for in-house promotions, but many sites such as news, blogs, and other content creators sell their “topbar” space to advertisers.
Mobile Ads
The final form of display ads worth noting is mobile ads. Considering that well over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, it makes perfect sense that this is a class all its own.
Mobile ads are created specifically for the responsive screens of smartphones and tablets. They have different dimensions, and usually a bit of different strategy behind them as well.
Skyscraper or SideBar Ads
SideBar ads are very tall but not thick. For this reason, they are placed on the side of websites. They are typically just inverse dimensions of banner ads.
The design of both banner ads and sidebar ads is tricky, as the dimensions do not allow you to use a lot of text to convey information. Graphics have to be clear, obvious, and effective when designing ads that are placed on sidebars or banner locations.
Square and Rectangle Ads
Display ads can also be featured throughout a website’s content. Typically when used throughout the copy of a page, display ads come in square or rectangle form.
These types of display ads allow for a little more creative freedom in terms of what can be included in the visual. That being said, following best practices in terms of the amount of text used in ads is still or paramount importance for rectangle and square ads.
YouTube Pre-Roll
YouTube is one of the largest websites in the world. In fact, it is so large, that it is impossible to actually know its full scope. What we do know are some blistering statistics that demonstrate its value in the digital marketplace.
Over 400 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and over one billion hours of video are watched every single day by nearly 2 billion active users. For those in the 18-44 demographic, 90% watch videos on YouTube, and more than half of those in the 75 and over demographic use YouTube as well.
With all of this, YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, and the second most visited website in the world, behind only their parent company, Google in both categories. For these reasons and many more, YouTube is one of the most worthwhile platforms for businesses to advertise on.
How It Works
TYPES OF YOUTUBE PRE-ROLLIN
There are a few different types of YouTube Pre-Roll videos. At its base level there are two different kinds of Pre-Roll ads – those users can skip and those they cannot.
Unskippable ads come in two forms, 30 second videos and short 5 second clips. Skippable ads can be anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes of video. A comprehensive YouTube Pre-Roll strategy includes several videos that fit the ad types listed above.
Strategy is crucial when creating YouTube Pre-Roll videos. Typically, when skippable Pre-Roll ads play, your advertisement has about 5 seconds to capture a user’s attention before they are able to skip your video. In short, first impressions are truly everything in the world of Pre-Roll.
Your video advertisements needs to immediately capture the attention of the viewer enough to have them continue to watch past the when the skip prompt becomes available. To do this, visual hooks and immediate calls to actions are necessary to help pull the viewer in to learn more about your business or company to draw them away from the content they are looking to watch.
With the aforementioned strategic aspects of Pre-Roll, you can see how important targeting is while launching pre-roll campaigns. If a viewer has no interest in the industry your business operates in, then they will most likely skip the video as soon as possible, or entirely zone out if they encounter an unskippable advertisement.
HOUSE PRODUCTION
All of our YouTube Pre-Roll is created in-house by our production team. We never outsource our work to freelancers or third parties. Since strategy is such a crucial piece of the puzzle when YouTube is concerned, we value having creative control and communication across departments to make sure the final product we create is strategic, attractive, and effective.
Our production team can take existing assets from your company and edit them together to create Pre-Roll videos or can do onsite shoots with our wide range of professional video equipment. Our production team utilizes aerial drones, zip line cameras, and movie-quality production equipment to create visually stunning content which will separate your business from the pack.
RETARGETING AND CUSTOM INTENT
Since YouTube offers users the option to skip Pre-Roll videos fairly often, strategic targeting is crucial to creating successful campaigns. A main part of our strategy is both retargeting and custom intent.
Retargeting involves showing pre-roll advertisements to viewers who have already visited your website. This is done by detecting cookies on the viewer’s web browser to understand their web browsing behavior. Re-targeting helps keep your brand in front of viewers’ minds, while also driving conversions for website visitors who did not complete the process of becoming a lead or customer during their visit to your site.
Custom Intent allows us to target individuals’ web browsing behaviors outside of just them visiting your website. We can take this a step further and target those who have recently visited your competitor’s websites. This helps educate viewers about your brand when it has been determined they are doing research on companies that operate in your industry.
Strategic targeting is one of the most powerful tools we can use when making sure that your Pre-Roll campaigns are spending your ad budget in the most beneficial way possible. This strategy combined with our talented in-house production team and years of experience combines to create advertising campaigns that other agencies just cannot match.
Native Advertising
Native Advertising has seen a huge uptick in popularity over the last few years, as websites continue to see the benefit of regularly posting new content.
In fact, you have probably come across several native advertisements today as you browsed your favorite local, national or international news website. You also probably didn’t even realize what you saw was even an advertisement, as it was displayed to blend in with the page, or appear native.
What Is Native Advertising?
Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed. The largest social platforms in the world monetize with native, in-feed ads, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The publishing industry is quickly following suit, as companies such as Time Inc, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today, continue to introduce new advertising integrations on desktop and mobile that match both the form & function of their editorial feeds.
Native Advertising is a way for websites to offer advertising space that does not clash with the overall aesthetic of their website. This also gives your business an added boost as native content which blends in with the design of the site it exists on, has a higher click through rate than standard display advertisements.
Content Creation’s Role In Native
Content Creation plays a massive role in native advertising. If your website is not regularly publishing new content such as blog posts, news articles or guides, then it will not have any content to display on other sites as native advertisements.
Native advertising allows us to choose from a variety of topics and interests which help your newly created content find users that are already intrinsically interested with the subject matter at hand.
Regularly publishing new content not only benefits search engine optimization strategies but also gives your site the potential to utilize this powerful form of digital advertising.
Music Streaming Advertising
Pandora and Spotfy have a few key differences that are worth examining to understand which platform would be the most worthwhile for your business to advertise on. Furthermore, the platforms do have specific demographics they cater to. Let’s examine the key differences between Spotify and Pandora.
Spotify
Spotify is the most powerful streaming platform for streaming and sharing music that users already know and love. The median age of Spotify users is lower than that of Pandora.
Spotify advertisement targeting works a little differently than many might expect. It targets the IP address of a user’s current Spotify session. As Spotify targets the IP address rather than account location information it allows those visiting from out of the area to be advertised to, instead of only the local population.
Spotify offers advertisements in three formats – audio, video, and display advertisements. It allows a period of free listening for users in exchange for watching a brief video advertisement or uses display advertisements along with audio ads in between songs for listeners using their free service.
Spotify can be listened to on a mobile device or desktop application. Their advertisements run coherently across different platforms, making sure that no matter what device is being used to stream music, your advertisement will find the audience you are targeting.
Pandora
Pandora entered the market as the first digital streaming service in 2010. The company’s popularity grew quickly as its users discovered how it helped them discover new music that was similar to what they were listening to. Pandora’s strength still lies in helping its users discover new music. On average the median age of Pandora users is higher than that of Spotify.
Pandora also allows for the targeting of specific audiences based on several different factors ranging from basic demographic info all the way to what and how they listen to Pandora. Pandora also offers the same style of advertisements that Spotify does –
- Display
- Audio
- Video
That being said, Pandora offers more varieties of choices within those styles of advertisements than Spotify does. Pandora also has a greater variety of platforms from which it can be listened to than Spotify. The most noticeable difference is Pandora comes as a standard application in many new vehicles.
It is worth noting that, typically, Pandora does require a higher monthly budget than Spotify advertisements.
In House Production
All of the assets needed to run an advertising campaign on digital streaming platforms are made by our in-house production team. These include display ads, audio commercials, and videos.
From the moment you decide to begin digital advertising on a streaming service, our digital department will work alongside our graphics and production team to create compelling and effective advertisements.
As always you will be in the center of the process making approvals and suggesting edits throughout the production process. Once you approve our designs, our digital team will place the ads and target the perfect audience to drive traffic, conversions, and sales.
