Banner advertising nowadays is a highly sophisticated form of advertising. A lot like other forms of advertising and marketing tactics that have significantly developed over the years, this area has significantly changed.
Ever wondered, for example, why is it that once you have looked at a flight online, banners offering flights start magically appearing on other sites you are looking at?
Make no mistake about it – this is NOT by chance. Advertisers work very hard to target audiences online that are more likely to become buyers.
It’s called Remarketing, or Retargeting. I’ll give you a short explanation on how this done:
You start by collecting the audience that’s already visiting you site. Using Google’s tools, you start creating remarketing audiences based on user behavior.
Once you have sufficient audience to target, you create the ad and ‘add’ the audience to the ad campaign. The ads that you create will be displayed to users all over the web. This is a Huge marketing tool. I know that a lot of businesses worry that remarketing is hated by customers, but the truth is, that the more times they see the ad, people are more likely to click and purchase.
For example; you are the digital manager of Bookings.com and you ‘collect’ users who viewed flights from London to New-York, but never booked a flight. This group of users will be the basis for your ad campaigns. To this group, you can present an ad about your services wherever they browse on the web, with a link back to the page on your site you want them to login to.
The idea is, that audiences who are already familiar with your brand, are more likely to buy from you when they see your ad, even if they see it on other sites.
Taking this a step further, you may want to consider Dynamic retargeting. What this means is that as an advertiser you have a set of ads, and an ad is displayed to user based on a specific product they were looking at. To continue our booking.com example, with dynamic retargeting, the user will see ads on flights from London to NYC, or ads of hotels in NYC.
Retargeting is an amazing technique to keep in touch with your site visitors wherever they travel on the web. I highly recommend taking advantage of it.
As always, do let us know if you have any questions!