With the rise of business technology, traditional marketers now have many options to support their marketing campaigns.

Various digital advertising tools now offer highly targeted and massive reach capabilities. For example, Google’s Display Network can reach over 2 million websites to display your business’ advertisement.

Display advertising (including clickable ads that appear in website margins) has many advantages that can improve your business’ online presence by:

• Effective targeting
• Flexible costs
• Measurable results

All you need to do is carry over your knowledge of your audience so you can determine where to reach them online.

Few words from Google:

Our job at Google is to make sure that marketers and agencies are armed with the best tools to help you plan, create, buy and target, and measure and optimize your campaigns.

• Massive Scale: With significant global coverage your message will reach more of your target audience, in more places, more often.
• Measurable Performance and Maximized Results: The Display Network delivers measurable performance for both branding and direct display clients; maximizing their results.
• Contextual Engine: A key driver of the success is Google’s ability to harness the power of the best contextual engine on the planet to place ads against the most relevant content.
• Custom Networks through Effective Targeting: Keyword contextual targeting, along with other targeting technologies available on the Google Display Network such as placement targeting and audience targeting, allows you to build and target to your own custom networks and to find and connect with the right customers more effectively and more often.
• Transparency, Actionable Insights and Value through Auction: In terms of campaign management, tools such as the Placement Performance Report, Conversion Optimizer, and Conversion Tracking provide complete transparency into what’s working, and what isn’t. This gives you the actionable insights you need to help you effectively optimize your campaigns.

Why should you use the Display network?

Branding: this is by far – to my opinion, the top benefit of Display advertising. Just by being present and visible on the web can create trust and knowledge of your brand.

Put your brand out there, make your ads scream: “Look at me, my products are great!”, and half of the work is done!

Create demand: by being visible on the GDN, you can create the need or demand for your product. It is not a surprise that today, people are so influenced by what they see (on TV, in the street, social media etc…), we want what we see.

Specific targeting: as said above, the multiple targeting options offered by the GDN is a big bonus! Needless to say you can also combine and mix those options to be as targeted as possible.

Why does that matter? By using several targeting options, you certainly decreased the audience of your ads BUT the audience is so targeted, that the users are the ones who are the most interested in what you have to sell.

Traffic on the website: it is so easy to click on an ad just as when we click the ‘Like’ button on Facebook.

Because the number of impressions of your ads increases a LOT when you do Display, the CTR goes down. But not to worry, the GDN can generate a lot of clicks!

Flexible Cost

There are two payment plans available to advertisers who use display ads. The plans don’t have a contract, unlike traditional print advertising.

With all the ads, you set the price you want to pay when your ad is displayed and it then goes to auction. Your ad price is compared to other advertisers’ set price, and the winner gets the ad spot.

Cost per click bidding (CPC), the most widely used, means you’ll be charged for each click on your ads.

Cost per thousand impressions bidding (CPM) means you will be charged based on the number of impressions your ads receive.

Short conclusion

You have the ability to receive daily or weekly updates and track the number of times your ads are clicked. The tracking tools help you assess whether your ad campaign is performing or if you need to tweak your efforts. Display ads gather a lot of data that provides you with reports on traffic to your website, brand awareness, and sales and conversions.