We might not say it out loud, but we certainly think it. Many businesses pay WAY too much for their display advertising. To make things worse, they typically don’t even know exactly what they are getting and how it is really performing.
Small and Medium sized businesses owners are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They know how important it is to capture the desktop and the growing mobile audiences yet they have difficulty keeping up with the ever-changing environment. To make things worse, a lot of local media conglomerates, small marketing firms and print publishers represent themselves as a “digital agency” in order to sell overpriced products with a limited capabilities.
SimpleLogic tries to make mobile and display advertising as easy as possible. Although pricing is always important, the targeting capabilities are almost as important.
- Who is your audience? The more specific and defined an audience is, the fewer people who probably fit into that audience, which means few ad placements are available. The trade-off is that the responses to those ads will be higher than other general campaigns.
Here is an example of an extremely targeted campaign that we recently ran: Women between 35-65, income over $100k, home value over $200k, interested in charities- specifically children’s charities, within a few specific neighborhoods. The hyperlocal mobile component created fences around high net worth businesses that were currently involved in multiple charity and fundraising sponsorships. Although the audience was very small in the selected geography, the campaign outperformed industry benchmarks by almost 300%.
Would our client have been better suited to use Categorical targeting, taking into account a 25 mile radius from their location and focusing on men and women interested in things like fundraising, charities, etc.? Possibly. Although the click-through numbers wouldn’t have been as high, the ads would have been displayed to a much larger audience so actual conversions into sales would have benefited.
Note: If your digital agency is actually running a targeted campaign correctly, there will be an increased cost for every specific interest that is added to the campaign. If there isn’t, you aren’t getting all of the targeting options you would like!
- How often are the ads placed, and how many times are they shown to each individual? Every legitimate digital agency buys directly from publishers who have billions of ad placements available each month. They buy through a DSP (Demand Side Platform), and each DSP requires the ad buyer to specify how many times an ad is shown to specific people on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Many print publishers and media companies resell digital advertising products that are bought through a vendor, since their ability to buy directly from a DSP is hampered by both cost to access the platform and technical know-how. The reseller doesn’t normally know exactly how to buy the media, and the vendor makes sure that they will be able to get enough impressions to make the buy worth their while.
The end result is that a campaign is actually set up much more broadly than the customer really wanted, and the ads are shown to the same people way too many times for the campaign to be a complete success.
Note: If your sales person does not show you the granular details of how the program is going to be run, they probably don’t know or care to know.
- How exactly are the mobile ads being run? There are a few different types of mobile campaigns that are available to a business owner:
- App Campaign– target mobile apps
- Mobile Web Campaign– target mobile optimized websites
- Mobile Retargeting Campaign– target users who have visited your site in the past
- Mobile Video Campaign– placement of video or rich media ads
- HyperLocal Campaign– target users based on GPS location (a fence that ranges within a few feet of location to nationwide)
Note: Every mobile campaign is priced differently based on the targeting and capability. If your sales rep is only selling you “mobile”, it’s definitely worth your time to get more details!
- How much are you paying for commissions vs ads? Unless you are buying from a legitimate digital agency, there are many layers of sales people and commissions that need to be paid out of your budget. The larger the company who is selling the product, the more people involved. Buying display or mobile advertising from one of these companies ensures that you will be paying much more than you should, and the delivery of the product will not meet your expectations.
Note: SimpleLogic does not use a vendor to place display and mobile advertising- we ARE the vendor. This ensures that you are getting the best pricing, reporting and customer service that is available!
