Whether you are an Islamic organization or a mainstream brand targeting Muslims you need to make analyzing and optimizing your display advertising a key part of your digital marketing strategy.
Today’s technology gives you the ability to measure and use data to enhance the performance of display campaigns like never before. But you need to learn how to successfully analyze and optimize your display campaigns.
In order to reach Muslim audiences online efficiently, you must work with the only ad network that specializes in targeting Muslim audiences exclusively: Muslim Ad Network.
Although we take care of most of the below items for you, as always, we feel that offering useful information to our current and potential customers is a valuable practice.
In this guide we discuss:
- 4 reasons to optimize display advertising before publishing
- Measuring your display advertising
- What is a good click-through rate (CTR)?
- Best practice for optimizing live published ads
- A/B testing display campaigns
4 Reasons to Optimize Display Advertising Before Publishing
Reason 1: Avoiding Being Rejected
Most ad networks, including MAN, have strict requirements that display ads must adhere to. For instance, your banner set could be rejected if an HTML5 animation exceeds 15 seconds, or an ad file size exceeds set limits. Therefore, it is critical that all your uploaded ads comply with the requirements of the ad network you intend to use. This will help you avoid unnecessary repetitive design tasks.
Reason 2: Improving Ad Performance
Optimizing determines the performance of your ads. Take file size for instance. Make sure your ad is not too “heavy” or it will not perform well. Text, images, and/or code that ramp up the ad to have over 150 kilobytes will ruin the browsing experience of your targeted Muslim users.
The IAB guidelines recommend that all display ads must be lightweight, load fast, and contain non-disruptive content. Basically, the smaller the file size of your ad, the better it will perform for you!
For more optimization tips please read:
50% More Sales Via Your Display Ads? Do This
7 Simple But Extremely Effective Display Ad Ideas
7 Quick Fixes to Your Landing Page for Converting Your Display Ad Campaign
Reason 3: Targeting Viewers with Refined Creative
You may use data and previous campaign performance to make your creative decisions and create hypotheses for the creative choices you make in your display ads.
By using your own data and research you can learn what works specifically for a campaign or a specific Muslim audience.
Reason 4: Save Time and Money
By avoiding rejection, adopting the IAB guidelines, and designing your ads with refined creative you ultimately save on production time and budget.
Optimizing the production processes and avoiding repetitive tasks is the first step towards improved ad performance and a stronger ROI.
Measuring Your Display Advertising
After pre-optimizing and publishing your display campaign, it is paramount that you measure its performance consistently.
You must monitor how often your ad is seen, how effective it is in attracting and engaging users, and whether your ad brings in revenue for your business.
You can measure the performance of your display advertising based on the types of campaigns you are running and your chosen KPIs. Make sure you are using the metrics most suitable for your campaign. For example, click-through rate is associated with lead generation while impressions and reach are good for measuring awareness.
Key Display Advertising Metrics
Let’s take a quick look at the various display campaign metrics you can use:
Impressions
“An impression is a metric used to quantify the number of digital views or engagements of a piece of content, usually an advertisement, digital post, or a web page. Impressions are also referred to as an ‘ad view’.”
Source: Investopidia
Ad Reach
“Ad Reach is a count of the number of people who viewed your ads at least once. Reach can help you understand how many people have been exposed to a specific advertisement or marketing message.”
Source: Klipfolio MetricHQ
Ad Engagement
Ad engagement shows how many people interacted with your ad. This could include measuring clicks, likes, or more complex actions such as filling in a form in a banner.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
“Click-through rate is the rate at which your PPC ads are clicked. This number is the percentage of people who view your ad (impressions) and then actually go on to click the ad (clicks). The formula for CTR looks like this:
(Total Clicks on Ad) / (Total Impressions) = Click Through Rate”
Source: WordStream
Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
“Cost per click is how much you pay per click (pretty self-explanatory). This is an interesting metric though because many think there’s not much one could do to change this. However, well-optimized campaigns should lead to a declining CPC over time.”
Source: Engeniusweb
Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)
“Cost Per Acquisition, or ‘CPA’, is a marketing metric that measures the aggregate cost to acquire one paying customer on a campaign or channel level. CPA is a vital measurement of marketing success, generally distinguished from Cost of Acquiring Customer (CAC) by its granular application.
Total Campaign Cost
_________________ = CPA
Conversions”
Source: BIGCOMMERCE
Return on investment (ROI)
Return on investment (ROI), is a key performance indicator (KPI) used to determine the profitability of an expenditure; in this case campaign costs. It’s predominantly used for measuring success over time and taking the guesswork out of making future business decisions.
ROI is calculated by taking the total revenue from your campaigns and deducting the total cost of running that ad in order to report the net profit.
Post View Conversion
When a user views your display ad but doesn’t click on it, then visits the site and converts within a set period (known as a look-back window), the action is attributed as a post view conversion.
Post Click Conversion
Post Click Conversion records when someone clicks your ad and then proceeds to convert on your website straight away.
Note: Some metrics are more relevant than others for different types of campaigns. Before you start a campaign, research the most relevant metrics to use and stick to them. Plus, make sure you have access to reliable and transparent data for your ad analytics ( this is something we also offer at MAN complimentary to our Ad services).
What is a good click-through rate (CTR)?
This is an important question that you need to know an answer to, and it is one that can vary a lot through industries and even banner formats.
CTR is vital since it measures how often users who view an ad end up clicking on it.
It is an essential metric for display advertising as it is a clear indicator of engagement with a potential consumer.
The awesome thing about it is that the quality of the imagery, ad positioning, ad copy, and many other elements that impact CTR can be controlled and altered by you – the advertiser.
CTR Varies Among Display Advertisers
Google Display Network data indicates that the average CTR can vary widely, with the benchmark across all ad formats and placements for a display ad CTR approximated at 0.05%.
As mentioned earlier, the CTR for different industries and organizations can vary because audiences for different campaigns consume display advertising differently. The type of display campaign also makes a huge difference.
For example, a static brand awareness campaign for a brand advertising the latest update to an Accounting software will have a weaker CTR compared to a dynamic holiday resort ad featuring in-banner video and real-time product offers.
To find out what the display click-through rate is for your industry read: Google Ads Benchmarks for YOUR Industry by WordStream.
NB: Muslim Ad Network’s higher quality audience and constant optimization helps clients average around 0.10% CTR.
Best Practice for Optimizing Live Published Ads
Once you have published a display campaign, the implementation of your display strategy begins.
You want to analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns, measure campaign costs, conversion rates, and continually A/B test to determine what imagery and messaging is working for your brand.
Measure Your Conversion Rates
It goes without saying that it is paramount during, and at the end of your campaigns, to measure the conversion rates of your campaigns.
A conversion is not necessarily a consumer transaction. It may be whatever action or goal you have set for your display campaign. For example, a whitepaper download may be set as a conversion for middle-of-the-funnel campaigns.
Boost Performance with Speed and Timely Marketing
The world events never stop coming up in the news. Take a security breach carried out on your competitor’s software for example. You would want to quickly create a special campaign or edit a live one just to capitalize on the news.
Therefore, being able to react and edit published ads in real-time, across the web, or create new ones is a necessity.
Build a Relevant Post-Click Landing Page
All of the work you put into the ads mean absolutely nothing if the destination of those ads – the landing page – is not optimized to convert. You will have wasted time, effort, and money for nothing.
Your landing page is either a well-designed machine that converts visitors to buyers or a humongous waste of time, effort and money.
Source: 7 Quick Fixes to Your Landing Page for Converting Your Display Ad Campaign
Test Your Ad Creative
Testing variations of ad creative is a basic best practice.
A few years back, advanced display ad testing and live optimization were either too slow or too expensive to work effectively. Today with the right ad tech you can perform what was once a complex process with ease.
A/B Testing Display Campaigns
A/B testing helps boost performance and save money. It is a display campaign optimization strategy practiced by many high-performing brands.
What is A/B testing?
A/B testing is when you test two variants of the same display ad, with slightly different creatives. Think of the call-to-action (CTA), image, or variation of the ad copy. You can then measure which ad performs better in comparison to the other. You can then begin again with another element.
The Basic A/B Testing Process
- Create version A of your display ad, in all the sizes required for your campaign.
- Duplicate version A to create a B variant of the set.
- Change the copy, image, CTA color, etc, to differentiate version B from version A. But remember to test only one element at a time otherwise you will not know which element contributed to the change in performance.
- Next, publish both versions simultaneously and set the display frequency to 50/50.
- Use an analytics tool to compare the performance of the two versions. Make sure you have enough impressions to view accurate performance trends.
- Finally, adjust the display frequency based on performance. For example, if version B wins the A/B test, then set the display frequency to 30-70%.
All of the above-mentioned need to be planned and executed perfectly for you to enjoy the best ROI possible. At Muslim Ad Network , we take that worry off your hands and constantly work on optimizing your digital marketing campaign for Muslim audiences.
If you would like to know more, please get in touch with us today.
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