Four Tips to a More Engaging Ad - The Great American Small Business Challenge | The Great American Small Business Challenge

Engagement is becoming an important part of display advertising and digital marketing, but it’s difficult to quantify, even with desktop users. Much of that work involves engaging with your customer base in a meaningful way, generating data you can use to improve your ads based on what customers do once they see your page. How you define and measure that data will determine how precise your efforts at targeting will be.

Willingness to Engage

You have to view your advertising in the context of where it may be published. This is why buy-side platforms allow you to target by interest. Targeting customers by their interest is a good way to apply your competitive research too. Customers interested in the categories that match your products are typically interested in seeing ads like yours. This will increase your click thru rate, and improve your chances of getting a conversion.

Utilize Best Practices

Many of the same practices that you utilize for banner advertising also apply to the mobile sector, but ad sizes are very different on mobile. Check with your buy-side platform to see which ad sizes perform best. Also be sure that your ads do not contain loud colors, or text that is hard to see. Test your ad units thoroughly. Run your own testing to confirm that your page loads efficiently and that mobile users can see everything.

Personalize, but Don’t Over Personalize

Generally, some of the biggest names in advertising agree that we are headed toward predictive marketing. That’s what makes targeting so useful. It allows advertisers to deliver a precise message to an intended audience. However, there is a dark side to this targeting that you need to be aware of. Ads tend to follow users around if they repeat searches within the categories you target. Wherever possible, fine tune the frequency of your advertising and try to target new users by expanding your target market.

Practical Tips

Rich media content is still popular in mobile advertising, especially content that encourages users to do something interactive. It’s also important to remain part of a seamless experience, so how your ads are shown is extremely important.

Bio: Ted Dhanik leads the team at engage:BDR, home to a buy-side platform for desktop and mobile advertising. Ted Dhanik previously helped develop brands MySpace.com and LowerMyBills.com. Ted Dhanik is available at engage:BDR.