For marketers that want to run online display ad campaigns, choosing between direct channels and real-time bidding (RTB) platforms might seem a little unclear at first. After all, the ultimate result is the same: you are placing your ads on a website somewhere. The process that a marketer must follow, however, to reach that end goal is very different depending on the approach, and each has its pros and cons. To help you understand which approach may be best for you, we’ll begin by contrasting some of the characteristics of traditional direct buys and RTB, and what they mean to brands, age [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column | Display Advertising: Programmatic Media Buying

Google took the lead in US digital display ad revenue last year, earning $2.26 billion. After coming in second to Facebook in 2011, Google outsold their top competitor in 2012, selling $80 million more than Facebook's $2.18 billion. In last week's digital display ad earnings report, eMarketer predicts Google will continue to lead Facebook and Yahoo, earning an estimated $3.11 billion in digital display ad revenue by year's end. The overall US display advertising market is expected to grow 18.1 percent in 2013, with Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL forecasted to earn a combined [...]

Related Topics: AOL | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Facebook Exchange | Google: Display Advertising | Microsoft: Bing | Top News | Twitter: Advertising | Yahoo

DG MediaMind released the 2012 Global Benchmarks Report, an analysis of more than 600 billion display ad impressions in 2012 from standard banners, rich media and video. The study showed that engagement improved with the inclusion of rich media and interactive video elements in ads. Globally in-stream video ads grew, and video ads met the threshold to be included in the benchmarks for 23 countries versus just 16 previously. Here is a breakdown of CTR in North America by ad type: 0.10% Standard Banner 0.14% Rich Media 0.16% Expandable Banners 0.85% In-Stream Video 1.92% Intera [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Statistics: Online Advertising

Chartbeat, a provider of web-analytics software, is on a mission to convince publishers that below-the-fold ad opportunities may be more valuable than top of page ad placements. Using a cross-section of data from publishers in their network, Chartbeat found that web visitors are only engaged for a few seconds at the top of the page, while 66 percent of a visitor's Engaged Time over a 24-hour period happened below-the-fold, the area of a page not visible when the page is opened in a browser. According to Chartbeat, their Engaged Time metric is a more effective way to measure visitor activ [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising

Equality has arrived in Twitter's advertising system. The company has announced that small, self-serve advertisers now have access to the same "advanced" dashboard as bigger spenders, and can also target ads using the same options as big brands. These are things that Twitter has offered its bigger advertisers for some time now, but weren't offered to the little guys until today. Little advertisers logging in today will see the "Switch to Advanced" option at the top of the dashboard. And, whether they use that or not, they'll have access to new targeting options that only big advertisers [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising

We all know the day of multi-device and cross-screen usage is here. The challenge for marketers is to understand how to communicate effectively with consumers as they engage with multiple devices simultaneously and sequentially throughout the day. A new study commissioned by Microsoft, titled Cross-Screen Engagement, aims to help marketers learn how users are engaging with multiple screens and to find opportunities to reach consumers "in their moment". In the two-phase study, Flamingo Research and Ipsos OTX interviewed consumers in five markets—Australia, Brazil, Canada, the UK and t [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Features & Analysis | Internet Marketing Industry: Stats | Microsoft | Mobile Marketing | Search Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Statistics | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Online Advertising | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Top News

Premium inventory. What exactly does that mean? We think we all know: it’s that custom ad placement on ESPN.com, or the full-page takeover on NYTimes.com. Some of us may think a gaming site like IGN is premium; others may disagree. Overall, the basic premise is that premium inventory is the media found on a well-known and well-respected publisher. Clean, Well-Lit Inventory Personally, I prefer “clean, well-lit” inventory as an expression of what’s good rather than “premium.” The popularity of sites can wax and wane so rapidly that it’s impossible to keep up with the top [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column

I have a passion for filters, especially in partnership with Excel, the AdWords User Interface (UI) and AdWords Editor. Regardless of whether you are working with small campaigns or very large campaigns, filters can help make reporting and management much faster. [caption id="attachment_35765" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Campaign Code Filter[/caption] Coming Up With Code Names In The AdWords UI & AdWords Editor Codes may be your secret power against time. There are so many options now for setting up your Google Display campaigns that you really need a way to stay organized when y [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column

Yelp is now selling display ads in its mobile apps, with two advertisers -- Taco Bell and InterContinental Hotels Groups (IHG) as the first two advertisers to give it a try. According to Ad Age, those two companies will have exclusivity for the month of March in their respective categories -- Taco Bell for restaurant-related searches and IHG for travel-related searches. The IHG ads are reportedly showing today, but I'm not seeing them yet in my searches. AdAge says the Taco Bell ads are expected to begin showing on Thursday. Their article included this screenshot showing a Taco Bell disp [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Display Advertising | Mobile Marketing | Top News | Yelp

One of the most common questions that marketers face in buying display advertising is whether to contact a publisher or ad network directly to purchase inventory (called a Direct Buy), or through indirect channels using real-time bidding (RTB) systems. To those with experience in the RTB realm, it's well understood by now that there is an element of unpredictability and fluctuation in the availability and consistency of volume from specific publishers or sources of ad inventory. This can often lead to frustration, especially when trying to optimize and automate your campaigns. To appreci [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column | Retargeting & Remarketing

Federated Media Publishing's CEO, Deanna Brown, is stepping down to be replaced by the person she replaced herself -- chairman, founder and former CEO John Battelle. Brown joined FMP in 2009 to take the media company "to the next level." In a blog post, Battelle says Brown came to him earlier this year saying she wanted "to move on and do something smaller and more directly related to content creation." Though the two initially tried to think of a candidate to replace Brown, Battelle eventually decided to come back to full time work at the company he founded in 2005. Brown isn't yet talking [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Internet Marketing Industry

A new AdSense ad format started popping up on websites at the end of last month that puts the emphasis on ad headlines. In the new interactive format, only the ad headlines are displayed in large font with arrow button icons next to them: However, when you mouse over a headline, it becomes underlined and then animates and reforms to show the full ad. When you mouse over the next ad, the previous ad reverts back to the headline in a smaller font for a brief period before returning to the larger font size. The videos below, captured by @incrediBill and first posted at WebmasterWorld, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Google: AdSense | Top News

Many newcomers to online ad buying have questions regarding the traffic they can buy through a demand-side platform (DSP). How much does it cost? How much of it is available? What is the quality like? The answers are actually interrelated, and require an understanding of the mechanics behind how real-time bidding (RTB) works. Industry Terminology Explained First, a clarification of some industry terminology. The first page that a visitor views -- more often than not the home page -- is called the "first impression." The second page is the "second impression," and so on. Since most adve [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column | Retargeting & Remarketing

Many online marketers love social media marketing because it's traditionally been a free channel for customer outreach and/or customer service; but, almost two-thirds of those who answered a recent survey say they'll be spending more on paid social media ads this year. According to a new report from the Nielsen-owned company, Vizu, 64 percent of online marketers say their budgets for paid social advertising is increasing this year. Thirty-four percent said those budgets will remain the same, and the other two percent said their budgets are decreasing. That's good news for Facebook an [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Statistics: Spend Projections

The world’s largest online retailer is now positioned to expand its advertising services. MIT Technology Review reports that after relying on third-party technology and ad exchanges over the past year, Amazon has developed its own in-house advertising platform. Amazon has an unrivaled bank of data on online consumer purchasing behavior that it can mine from its 152 million customer accounts. The company knows what millions of people actually buy or are intending to buy and it can now give salivating advertisers a way to target ads based on that data. While Amazon has not commented, the MI [...]

Related Topics: Amazon | Channel: Retail | Display Advertising | Top News

Federated Media, a company that began by placing display ads on high-traffic blogs and other publisher sites, now claims to be the third largest US ad network according yet-to-be released December data from comScore. November ad network rankings show Federated was number four, reaching an audience of 186.3 million unique users.   The press release out today says that its uniques have grown to 193 million, according to comScore. That puts it behind only Specific Media and Google. Not long ago, Federated Media moved away from direct sales and banners and shifted its focus to programmat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Retargeting & Remarketing | Top News | Word Of Mouth Marketing

It's been a few months since the testing and opening of the Facebook Exchange (FBX), the network that opens up Facebook display inventory for real-time bidding and retargeting. Now, with the holiday season under its belt, one of Facebook's partners, Triggit, is releasing some impressive stats about the program's success for its clients. The company's in-house analyst, Hyunyoung Choi, who has previously worked at Facebook, Google and Hyundai, found that users were 240% more likely to return to an advertiser's site after they were retargeted on Facebook. Additionally, the company's study foun [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Facebook: Facebook Exchange | Retargeting & Remarketing

Which ad networks are -- deliberately or inadvertently -- contributing to piracy of movies, TV shows and music by running ads on the sites that enable the illegal distribution of this copyrighted material? Answering that question was the aim of a USC Annenberg Innovation Lab study released today that found that Google, Yahoo and Quantcast are among the top ten networks placing ads on well-known pirate sites. The researchers used Google's transparency report related to copyright violation sites to identify pirate sites, then crawled them to determine what ad networks were serving ads on tho [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Google: Display Advertising | Legal: Copyright & Trademark

Well, it’s that time of year again: time to squeeze in every little bit of revenue before the 2012 books close; time to take every last day of vacation before they magically disappear at the stroke of midnight on December 31st; and, perhaps most importantly, it’s that time of year when a whole host of year-end roundup articles ranging from the "Top 10 Things We Learned" to articles detailing every well-intentioned, but rarely kept, resolution ever made. I never thought I would write a “Things We Learned” type article because of a dreadful fear that I only recently learned somethin [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Features & Analysis | Search Marketing | Search Marketing Column

I believe display advertising is actually in its infancy. There are powerful dynamic variables at work that are creating major challenges for the advertising technology industry at large. Depending on the vendor, its technology stack and its level of commitment to legacy beliefs, this is either a problem that is of  concern or the opportunity of a lifetime. Either way, evolution is at work. Reality Check In the 1940's, science fiction writers began dreaming of a medium that looked something like our beloved Internet does today. By the 1960’s, key discoveries were being made and impl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column