Profit by Saving Advertisers from Folly
Posted on Saturday, November 30, 2019 at 2:04 PM
Gain ad revenue by guiding advertisers to spend their ad budgets
wisely.
By William Dunkerley
How many times
have you returned over and over again to a restaurant that serves you a
bad meal? Not often, I'd guess. But many publishers are serving bad
advertising experiences to their advertisers and getting away with it.
What's the difference?
Identify Bad Ad Experiences
First,
let's define what a bad advertising experience is. It's simply one when
the advertisement is unproductive. It doesn't effectively sell the
product or service, or doesn't enhance the brand image.
In the
restaurant analogy it's that the food, service, or ambience is
unpleasant or doesn't match expectations. The diner experiences that
result personally and knows if the choice of restaurant or menu item is
worth the bill.
In the case of media advertising, the result is
not so direct or personal. Some advertisers rely upon metrics such as
click-throughs. Others correlate advertising campaigns with sales
results. A limited subgroup conducts surveys to measure response. But
for many advertisers there is no clear feedback loop.
When
Following Ad Trends, Proceed with Caution
My observation is
that many advertisers are influenced by industry trends in advertising
methodology.
What are the trend lines telling them? According to
Ignite Visibility, a digital marketing agency, "In 2019, native ads make
up over 61% of display ad spend, making them one of the fastest growing
formats on the market." The agency advises, "If you are not doing native
advertising, you are missing out."
The growth fever goes
beyond native advertising. Digital ads in general continue on an
upslope. Emarketer.com explains, "In 2019, worldwide digital ad spending
will rise by 17.6%."
All this has looked very enticing to
advertisers and has driven many to increase their expenditures. That's
actually good. Consumers are turning more and more to digital sources
for information and entertainment. There's a downside, though. Digital
advertising has been spun in a way that paints a deceptive picture. In
response advertisers are making unwise ad buys, and publishers who are
encouraging them are selling themselves short.
It is very
advantageous for you as a publisher to sell ads that are beneficial for
the advertiser. Doing so will help to keep that advertiser coming back
with more ad dollars. And if the advertiser's business grows, it will
have a larger ad budget to spend on your publication.
Ad industry
hype about digital and native advertising is leading to bad decision
making, however. It seems encouraging that digital ad spending will
"rise by 17.6%" in 2019. But that statistic can be misleading.
Non-digital advertising still amounts to half the total ad spend, and
the percentage increase in digital is following a declining curve.
That
decline may be attributable to saturation. Or it may be that some big
spenders are not seeing the results they expected. Ebay presents an
example. SmallBusinessTrends.com reports, "Ebay has recently thrown in
the towel for AdWords advertising, arguing that online ads are
ineffective." According to The Correspondent, the giant online
marketplace found that "for every dollar eBay spent on search
advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents."
What's more,
digital ad spend statistics are inflated by the industry's big spenders.
Emarketer.com makes that point: "Google will remain the largest digital
ad seller in the world in 2019, accounting for 31.1% of worldwide ad
spending, or $103.73 billion. Facebook will be No. 2, with $67.37
billion in net ad revenues, followed by China-based Alibaba, at $29.20
billion. Though Amazon has been steadily chipping away at the
Google-Facebook duopoly in the US, it will be a smaller player on the
global stage, with $14.03 billion in ad revenues. (That still makes it
the fourth-largest digital ad seller worldwide, however.)"
That
does not leave much for comparatively smaller magazine publishers and
others, does it?
The growth of native advertising spending is
misleading, too. Ignite Visibility explains its comparison of native
advertising versus display ad spend thusly: "People view native ads 53%
more than banner ads." That's not a fair comparison. Banner ads have
always been an ineffectual format, a fact that's now finally being
exposed. SmartInsights.com offers a comparative statistic: A full banner
ad (468x60) generates a click-through rate of only 0.04 percent. A large
rectangle (336x280) generates over 8 times as many, 0.33 percent.
In
other words, ad formats that more closely resemble traditional display
advertisements work better.
Stick with Proven Ad Formats and
Avoid the Intrusive Ones
Less effective formats should be
discouraged, as should ad formats that annoy readers. These include
banner and sticky ads, pop-ups, auto-start video and audio material,
interstitial ads -- anything that seriously interrupts the reader's
quest to read what they went to your publication to read.
These
formats have spawned the emergence of ad blockers. Some advocates of
native advertising hype that as a reason to go over to text-based
advertisements. But they flimflam the numbers, too. You see, they
include intrusive ad formats such as pop-ups, interstitial ads, and
banner ads within their definition of display advertising. That means
the comparison is unfair.
I know that you are likely confronted
with advertisers who want to buy relatively ineffective formats. My
recommendation is to work with these advertisers and mentor them about
what ad formats will give them the best results. Encourage them to
establish ways to measure the ultimate impact of their advertisements.
Click-throughs alone can be misleading. The ultimate answer for them
lies in how an advertisement or ad campaign affects the advertiser's
business. The ultimate answer for you lies in whether they keep coming
back and spending more.
William Dunkerley is principal of
William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.
Add
your comment.
Posted in (RSS)