When you’re building an online advertising strategy, you have a lot of choices to make. Video or banner ad? Gamified ad content or skinned pre-roll? Maybe a combination of several types? 

The type of display ad you use to get the word out about your product or service certainly matters, but your online advertising strategy needs to begin from a deeper place. To start, you need to define the ultimate goal of your ad campaign. Do you want to reach the most people possible? Do you want to block out your competitors?

The goal you select will be the driving force behind your online advertising strategy. In this post, we take a look at some common online ad goals and the marketing strategy that can make them happen. For personalized help with any aspect of your online advertising, reach out to Playwire.

Start with Your Advertising Goals

To build your online advertising campaign, start by identifying your chief advertising goal. Take some time to truly consider what matters to you, your brand or your offering. Many advertisers jump straight to impressions. While impressions can be an important ad performance metric, your overall advertising goal needs to be about outcomes - not impressions.

Here are some common goals that can drive an effective advertising campaign:

  • Maximize reach. You may want to boost brand awareness of your service or product by pushing for a high number of unique viewers over the life of the ad campaign or within a specified time period.
  • Optimize reach. Your goal may not be about maximum reach as much as it’s about reaching the right people. You can make it your advertising goal to primarily reach in-demographic individuals.
  • Highlight reasons to buy. Set a goal for a high number of completed video views or viewable impressions to get the word out about the benefits of your product or service. 
  • Actively engage consumers. Sometimes, engagement with your brand is more valuable than almost any other interaction. Your online advertising goal may be to push for more ad interactions or longer dwell time.
  • Acquire traffic. Clicks, qualified site visits and qualified incremental visits can all measure progress if your goal is to boost traffic to your website or landing page.
  • Drive lower funnel outcomes. Often, conversions are the most important goal of online advertising campaigns. You can push cost per action as a metric to test how far your ads are moving consumers down the sales funnel.

Once you have selected your goal, you can start to build a strategy that accomplishes that goal. 

Types of Advertising Strategies

You can use each of the advertising strategies we examine below alone or in combination to accomplish your unique online advertising goals.

Reach Many People

To maximize your reach in general or with certain demographics, your online advertising strategy needs to be all about simple, scalable video ads and super scalable display ads. The ability to reach a wide audience at scale needs to drive decisions about inventory types and channels. In short, go where your target audience is and cast as wide a net as possible.

To reach more people with your video ads, make sure you are managing your frequency caps. Frequency caps determine how often your video ad can be shown to a single person. Lower frequency caps mean your ads will reach more people, but people will see them fewer times each.

The graphic below shows how awareness and intent can increase with video ad exposure to help provide some context around what you should consider when managing your frequency caps. Your ultimate goal should be to use data targeting strategies to pinpoint the perfect user and reduce ad waste.

Block Out the Competition

When you need to reach your customer base without interference from your competitors, your advertising strategy needs to be all about blocking out the competition. You can do that easily with takeover packages or sticky flex leaderboards.

With a takeover package, you can fill every available inventory slot on a particular publisher’s site, app or game. That way, your competitors have no way to break through the rock-solid message you’re sending.

Sticky flex leaderboards are a premium, full-width ad format that remains in view as the user scrolls through the site. The ad starts out tall, to give advertisers significant visual real estate upon load, and then shrinks and stays sticky to the top of the viewport as the user scrolls down to stay in view without disrupting user experience. This format can include video.

Boost Click-Through Rate

Increasing click-through rate (CTR) can be a highly effective advertising strategy when traffic and engagement with your brand are important to you. 

In general, video advertising performs well for CTR, but you can double your CTR with skinned pre-roll. With skinned pre-roll, you get a branded frame around the video unit, effectively widening the space in which the user can click through to your site.  

You’ll also benefit by using data segments that targets ads to users with a high likelihood to click on the ads. Some monetization partners will have these data segments available to you.

Improve Engagement or Time Spent

Increasing engagement and time spent with your brand or product can yield long-term returns on your advertising investments. But how do you convince a potential customer to engage with you? 

Gamified units are fun, and drive engagement because they create mutual value exchanges between brand and audiences. This splashy media is usually in the form of a mini game that uses your creative assets. Even if they’re usually resistant to ads in general, users can hardly resist a quick, simple game. With gamified video, you can expect closer to a 15% engagement rate and a 15% CTR.

Foster Deep Brand Connections

Engagement with your brand is great, but you can take it a step further by fostering connections with your brand that will linger in consumers’ minds for years. There’s really only one way to foster deep brand connections: offer something that is authentic and actually valuable to consumers.

One example of this strategy that Playwire has deployed for many brands is offering in-game competitions for real-world prizes. By rewarding gamers with cash and physical prizes for their performance in a game, brands get the front-and-center spot in players’ minds during the in-game competition and long after it’s over.

Create a Custom Advertising Strategy with Playwire

Your goal should drive your online advertising strategy. It’s the pillar that supports the results your campaign will ultimately achieve. Keep in mind that this goal is the finish line, but there is a whole course to lay once you define it. 

To build a complete advertising strategy, you’ll need inventory, creative and lots of data to support the prize you have your eye on. Acquiring each of these assets takes a lot of time and investment. Playwire puts every aspect of advertisers’ campaigns in one place and manages it all. Desktop, mobile, in-game, over-the-top (OTT), esports and experiential ads are easy when you partner with Playwire.

Ready to move toward that goal? That’s where we come in. For help building your online advertising strategy and making it a reality, reach out to the online advertising experts at Playwire. Give us a call at 1-561-206-4621 or contact us online.

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