An introduction to Display Ads

Some terminology...

First off, you will likely hear display ads and banner ads and these terms are interchangeable and mean the same thing. And that thing is the digital ads that run on websites, either as large wide (hero) ads at the top of the page, or they sit within the website content. Display ads are entirely different from search ads, which are text based and will appear at the top of Google search results. There are many different formats (sizes) available, but the most common range is about 6 or 7 formats, and that will typically include a format specifically for mobile. Interestingly though, most display ad formats are intended for desktop.

Standard Media ads

More terminology...'standard' media will mean the ad contains imagery and text, and these ads can be created in 1 of two ways. Either the image (e.g. a product shot) has the text on top of it and the ad exists as a JPG ('static' ad), or the ad is built in HTML. In this case, the ad can use coded animation (CSS or JavaScript) such as graphical elements moving, spinning, scaling up or down, the text can be animated such as fade in or out, or it could type out on the ad and the Call To Action button (CTA), can have a rollover effect. This is far from an exhaustive list - just some examples.

In all, an HTML ad will be much more engaging. Static ads are quicker and easier to produce, but interactive, animated ads will perform better.

Rich Media Ads

'Rich' means video. It also means that the ad creation process is more involved, both from a development perspective and from publishing the ad. In terms of development, the ad will be built in HTML (and other coding languages) however it is more complex due to the nature of video and requirements that sit with it, such as it may need controls (e.g. mute and unmute). The video will also need to be resized to fit and potentially edited, then rendered at typically no more than 2.2mb

In addition, the ad will need to comply with the build requirements of the ad network (more on that later), which means it will need to go through testing phases.

Dynamic ads

In short, dynamic ads can be updated in realtime and at any point after the ad has gone live via the broswer based platform (it works differently depending on which ad platform you are using). This is great if you need to update the creative, copy or want to test the ad with different messaging at specific points to see what is working best.

Some Dynamic ads use cases

Broadly there are two types of Use Cases for dynamic ads. The first, would be if the marketing want to adjust or refine the wording as the ad campaign progresses. For example there may be several phases of creative and copy to keep users engaged or as an event approaches, such as a film release or a holiday event like Christmas where you would want to ramp up the urgency for your customers to purchase.

The second Use Case, would be for a large company who constantly refines it's offer or product listing such as a supermarket chain. They will want to promote new deals and offers and will often need to tweak their pricing to stay inline with competitors.

Another use case is for localisation. If a client is running large scale ad campaigns which will then be used over numerous territories in multiple languages, then there is a strong case for using Dynamic.

Sounds great - what's the catch?

There's no catch as such, but there are some key considerations. Firstly, dynamic ads are more expensive to develop and secondly they are more restricted by their very nature of being dynamic. So the design approach needs to be much broader to consider things like character count for new wording (and perhaps other languages), what type of imagery would need to be used, will the copy positioning always be the same.

And this is the risk with dynamic as the ads can look very formulaic. If your business requires a finely crafted, art-directed digital ad campaign, then dynamic is likely not the right solution. That is not to say that dynamic ads canoot be visually strong and impactful, but it is a much larger process.

Page takeovers

You will often visit a website and see that the website is wrapped (contained) by advertising creative from the same campaign and the ad formats running in the site are also for the same campaign. These are 'site takeovers', which are high impact ad purchases designed to ensure you can't miss the overall nature of the ads.

You will most likely only see these running on larger sites for large companies with large ad spends as not only do the ads cost more, they are generally bespoke builds for any given site hence there is a design and development cost associated with each site takeover.

Display ad networks

These are effectively the broadcasters. They are not the only means of an ad being published as some sites will 'self-serve', but for the most part an ad will be pushed to a publishing network like Google Display Network, and these will use cookies and third party cookies to serve the ad to your selected audience on websites which match your criteria. And from them you can collect the data on engagement, click through rates and so on.

The ad networks also have their own build specifications, particularly when it comes to rich media ads or dynamic ads. Be it Google, Sizmek (Amazon) or Flash Talking (Mediaocean) - they all have their own APIs, referernce docs, rich media handling and so forth. Standard ads however- as the name implies - are indeed standard and, minor tweaks aside, will pretty much run on any ad platform, whereas Rich Media ads will have to go through a QA process by the ad platform to be approved before they can be published.

To wrap up

There are many different aspects to the display ad process from initial concept and ideation, to design & copywriting, rolling out sign off designs across all formats, development & testing, pushing live as per the marketing plan, testing & refining based on performance. Ultimately there is no one-size-fits-all approach, but hopefully this article has given you a good sense of where you might start.