Using Google Analytic s to measure the efficacy of marketing strategies is not new. However, when a user turns into a customer, most conversion tracking tools will point at the last clicked ad for the conversion. This in itself is an incomplete picture, because customers research, compare and make purchase decisions based on a number of interactions across different digital media channels. Google introduced its Multi-Channel Funnels to give marketers a more complete picture of tracking customers’ purchase decisions by showing which channels the customer interacted with in the 30 days before making that purchase. The media channels covered in this report include paid and organic searches, referrals, email, affiliates, social networks and display ads.

As a marketer, you need to see why this will work for you. If you are running a campaign across different channels, you need to know how these work together to make a conversion. Basing your analysis on only the last click will give you an incomplete result, but take all the channels into account, and you have a well-rounded analysis of how your campaign works in tandem across different channels to make an efficient conversion.

Contextual Dynamic Creative Template

The Contextual Dynamic Creative Template lets you advertise all your products through a single ad unit. This means that you no longer have to create different ads for different products. You need to just create one ad unit and then Google will choose the most pertinent products to show on the ad in relation to the website where the ad will be displayed. It is important that you sync your product inventory in the Google Merchant Center feed with the ad unit you create so Google can pull out all the relevant products based on the websites where it displays your ad.

As a marketer you need to be on your toes, ready to cash in on any opportunity that presents itself to you. Google’s new overhaul may well be a thing of the past by the end of this year, but till that happens, make sure that you understand that as of now these are among the best tools you have to create and manage a suucessful ad campaign. Accordingly, you need to realize how to make Google bring out the best in your ad campaign through its brand new services, and work on it to make sure that you are not left behind on the marketing bandwagon.

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The +1 Feature

Organic search is becoming more and more personalised, which means that a global SEO strategy to achieve top ranking in the search engines is becoming a thing of the past. Google addressed this problem with the introduction of its +1 button, which works a great deal like the Facebook “like” button. If you have a Google profile, you can +1 an article you like, which will then show up on your profile. This can be searched through a +1 website search and in turn, help you achieve some ranking. While this started as a way to share articles, blogs and information, it was made available to advertisers soon enough. The addition of a +1 ad on your profile means that a friend in your circle has +1ed it, so it is perhaps more trustworthy and may be of more interest to you now. It is like allowing your ad to go up on the Google Network, and then having Google work for you to gain more visibility for your advertisement. This is taking advantage of the entire digital experience of a user, assuming that customer-centricity is working in the background, and allowing your campaign to benefit from this personalisation.
What this means is, when you +1 an ad, the recommendation will show up on the bottom of the ad whenever a friend views the ad anywhere on Google’s Display Network. Since the +1 button was already producing over 4 billion impressions a day, as an advertiser, this might mean a great deal to you and your campaign.

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Advertising can be tricky to handle, but once if you have the basics right, it can bring out unimaginably efficient results. Work your way around the basic premises, and see your ads work brilliantly in the face of competition.

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1. Size Matters: Look through multiple reports and they will all give you different results for the same question: What is the most effective size for your online ad? While reports from Dynamic Logic will tell you that the 234 x 60 half banner ads and the 180 x 150 small rectangle ads are more effective than leaderbaoards and large rectangles (1), Phoebe Ho of Google’s Ad-sense Optimization team will tell you that the best performing ad size is the 336 x 280 large rectangle, followed by the 300 x 250 medium rectangle and the 160 x 600 wide skyscraper (2). A research from Marketing Sherpa will tell you that the highest CTRs were achieved by the 300 x 250 and the 728 x 90 ad sizes (3). So where do you take your inspiration from? Provided you know where to place your ad on the website, you could really experiment with different ad sizes till you hit one that suits your business most. Things to keep in mind would be the ad content and the loading time of the ad. Remember most websites will not take image sizes above 50 kb because they slow down the loading time.
2. Well-rounded Content and Call to Action: Honestly, no one will click on your ad because you tell them to. Viewers are more demanding than you give them credit for. They will not do what you tell them to do unless you can convince them to do it. This means that an overbearing call to action is not going to get you anywhere unless there is content on the ad that lures them into clicking on it. When you are making your ad, remember this and create a well-rounded approach rather than just hawking your product and trying to goad viewers to become customers. Sure you have limited space for flair in your content, but brevity does not mean you compromise on quality. As David Belasco rightly said, “If you can’t write your idea on the back of my calling card, you don’t have a clear idea.” Keep it brief, keep it interesting, and viewers will automatically click on the call to action without your pushing them to.

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Keep Your Copy Clean

Your banner ad is your first point of contact with your potential customers. If you don’t design that with care, you know you are ruining first impressions. There are so many banners that have misspellings, bad grammar, poor expressions and just bad, almost rotten copy. Agreed you cannot write a thesis on your banner ad, but the least you can do is keep it clean. Pay attention to what you are writing, and how you are writing. If you are messing up simple spellings, your visitors go away thinking very poorly of your product. When a visitor is going to turn into a customer, he wants to that he is buying a well-rounded product or service and that the people he is dealing with are equally well-rounded. It’s called being presentable. A bad copy, smothered with even worse spelling is not going to work. Like we said a few sentences back, please pay attention and take into account every word that is going to go into your banner. Take the following ad for example. Would you want to buy health insurance from a company that does not spell “accuracy” and “thousands” right?

Make a banner that conveys trust, and avoid these mistakes to make sure people click on your banner and don’t just ignore it because you ignored the attention your banner deserved.

Your Image Says A Thousand Words

Most banner ads you see will have a face or a person to reinforce the message. This is a very clever way to do it, because at the end of the day, no matter how big our internet footprint is, we still prefer to deal with humans. A human face on a banner serves to give that essentially human quality to a product or a service and instantly raises chances of its being clicked. In that sense, using an image gives your banner a human face. A lot of people ignore this, and use a human face to just fill space on a banner or because it is the done thing to do. Worse, people get it all wrong and use images that have a watermark, are distorted because of arbitrary resizing, pixelated or plain irrelevant and cheap. Would you honestly think that the following banner is going to strike a chord with any of your viewers?

Don’t Push Too Hard

Put yourself in place of an average viewer. You see a banner ad that has at most two lines of copy and then a big call to action that screams “Buy Now”. What would you do? You would ignore it. Anybody would. Understand this, no one wants to buy right now. Viewers want to know about the product or service, and may click on your banner out of curiosity if your copy is good. Whether they are going to convert to a customer depends on how well you present your case on the landing page. Before that, the job of your banner ad is to entice, not sell. So avoid pushing your viewers to do what you would not do. Keep it simpler, say something like “Learn More” or “Subscribe to our newsletter” or even “Request a Free Quote Today” in order to entice, and not sell. If your visitors were that easy to sell to, every average hawker in the streets would a millionaire. They are not, and neither will you be unless you can make a presentable call to action.

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Customers want to know that they are not being scammed into paying. They want to know that it is a real person or a real company they are paying to, and that this real person or company can be reached if there is a query later. If your contact information is not visible and detailed, you are probably not telling the customers that you can be trusted. Avoid this mistake by putting your contact information at a visible part of every page on your website, in the header, footer or sidebar. A contact form, email address, phone number and mailing address can inspire trust and allow the customer to know that it is alright to buy an expensive or technical product from you because if there is a problem, they can get in touch with you.

How is Your Checkout Procedure?

In case of a big and established eCommerce site, customers are happy to sign up or register because they know they will come back to the site and that the site will have more interesting things to offer them. But for a smaller site, registration often is what puts customers off and they go away without completing their order. Keep the checkout procedure short, and give the customers an option to save their information in case they want to get back to the site at a later date. Tell them that this information will be stored and retrieved later if they come back to shop again. Keep the contact forms short and relevant and this will avoid the cardinal mistake of driving away a customer before completion of order.

Make Payment Options Simpler

Many sites make the mistake of acception payment only through MasterCard or PayPal. A lot of customers do not want to use their credit card for shopping. Some prefer net banking and some would want cash-on-delivery options. Use a payment service that is versatile and allows your customers to choose from different payment modes, credit card, debit card or net banking. Customers have different preferences for online shopping and using multiple modes of payments helps you expand your customer base.

Having an eCommerce site means taking a lot of factors into consideration. How customers shop, the analysis of data related to customers’ behavior on the site and having your own systems working optimally are just a few of them. Make sure that shopping on your site is smooth and easy, and there is no reason why your eCommerce site cannot be one of the few that actually work.

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Too Much on a Page

Sure, making the sale is the reason why you are an e-retailer, but put yourself in place of the customer and take a look at your site. Multiple images, too many categories, too much to compare, too many offers of low prices and freebies, too little filtering. Now if your site is offering nothing but confusion to a customer, chances are he will go to another one where he can shop at ease. Arrange everything logically and have a clear filtering system so your customer can find what he wants without having to rummage through a pile of other things. More importantly, have space on your website for opt-in boxes, contact information, policy and product details. Any discerning shopper would want to know these before he shops, and a whole barrage of products without this basic information is going to work against your sales.

Do You Choose High Volume or High Quality?

You could choose to have a very high volume of leads and keep your fingers crossed about the stats helping you later. But then a lot of these leads might be dead-ends, and you run the risk of losing customers. Or you could have a high quality of leads that may be fewer but chances are your sales will be better than in high volume leads. Customers that respond to high quality and take time off to fill out a longer form are usually repeat customers later, and this means that you know they will come back to shop again. However, still run a split A/B test through the Google Website Optimizer to know what works better for you.

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Skyscraper ads are a good bet if you want to advertise without distracting the viewer so much that he closes the webpage altogether. The standard skyscraper is about 120 x 600 and the wide skyscraper is 160 x 600. One of the main reasons why skyscrapers can work for you is that it has more space for your copy. Imagine having a standard one inch ad in a newspaper versus a quarter page. You cannot deny that the latter would have higher views, and therefore, skyscrapers also have more views than standard banners. Used wisely, these ads can relate to the content of the page, and have similar information that would make them look like a clever sidebar or menu beside the content, and click through rates can really shoot up that way. Since 468 x 60 banners cause banner blindness due to their overuse, a well-designed skyscraper may be your solution to an ignored ad campaign. Keep the size and viewer attention in mind, and you have a winning size.

Integrated Marketing Units

Integrated marketing units, abbreviated IMUs, are banners sized 300 x 250 or 180 x 150 as well as other sizes determined by the IAB (1). This means that are bigger than the average banner but do not hog space on the webpage to annoy visitors. They are good for you because they can be tweaked easily and made to contain roll overs and other media. They have a higher visibility rate and can fit into a website if the content on the ad is related to the website. The flexibility in size means that developers can work their way with multiple sizes till they find one that suits the advertising rationale perfectly.

The beauty of banner advertising is its flexibility. To get the maximum benefit of them you need to decide what works best for you. A full size ad may be good for some products and a skyscraper ad may be more suited to others, and what works most for you can only be decided upon once you have tested various sites and finally choose one that is creative, and not annoying. Pair that with appropriate placement and you have an ad that can catch viewers’ attention without them running away from it. Have your ads rotate and keep the sizes variable when you do so, to prevent banner blindness and make sure you have good copy to back up excellent placement and an eye-catching design.

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468 x 60

For a lot of advertisers, the size that automatically comes to mind is the 468 x 60. Why? Because it is easy to make, easy to fit into a website and can perhaps get the job done. Or so your developer told you. What he didn’t tell you though is that they have been around for too long. So long, in fact, that viewers have trained themselves to ignore them. They are small so they are obviously not prominent and a small little banner on a webpage is easy to miss when there are others. In fact, Marketing Sherpa, a website specializing in online marketing, did some research on which IAB standard ad sizes and found that this one is a bad performer:

So if this did burst your bubble, what works? Don’t hit the panic button yet because there’s plenty more to choose from, and work with till you get your money’s worth.

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