It is no secret that visual content is more engaging to readers. Whether you use infographics, social media images, video content, or just creating ads that are visually attractive, users will always react more to content that is more than just text on a screen.
But, just because you are using more visuals in your content and doesn’t mean they automatically work. Aesthetically pleasing content can be a great way to engage users, but you can still lose a huge amount of visitors if your content isn’t compelling and exciting.
To help you guarantee your visual ads are truly visually compelling and engaging, Bannersnack recently shared an infographic breaking down everything you need to know about visual ad creation. If you want to guarantee your visual ads are killing it every time, check out the infographic below or at Bannersnack.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-05-13 11:57:202016-05-13 11:57:20Learn The ABCs of Making Visual Ads That Work [Infographic]
Facebook Video has quickly grown to rival YouTube, so it is unsurprising that video ads have also become a major part of Facebook’s advertising platform. But, as more and more companies share their ads on Facebook, it is becoming significantly more difficult to stand out.
To help companies make the best ads possible for their platform and best engage their audience, Facebook took it upon itself to test out their video ads to see what is best in the eyes of consumers.
Facebook showed 965 video ads targeted to the United States and Europe to a panel of consumers in a way that mimicked Facebook News Feed on mobile and asked the participants to evaluate each ad based on four factors: first impressions, branding, messaging, and video features.
Let’s break down the biggest findings of the report:
Engage Users Fast Without Audio
The majority of marketers aren’t taking how users watch videos into account when they create their ads, according to the report. Despite the fact that videos play silently in the News Feed by default and many users watch without sound entirely, only 24% of the ads were comprehensible without ads.
Additionally, only 23% of these ads included brand messaging that was easy to understand within the first 10 seconds of video and less than half (46%) featured recognizable brand links.
Brands that ensured their ads quickly established their messaging and were understandable without sound were drastically more popular among respondents than those who didn’t.
Keep Your Messaging Clear To Spark Engagement
Videos that were intended to create a conversation and succinctly communicated a brands’ message were also more liked by participants in the study.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-05-11 11:08:092016-05-11 11:08:09Facebook Tells Advertisers How To Make The Best Video Ads
If you own a smartphone, chances are you know the frustration of accidentally tapping on an ad you had no interest in when you were trying to scroll down a page. These accidental taps aren’t just annoying to users, either. Advertisers hate these mobile clicks because they wind up paying for clicks from users who had no intention of converting.
Now, Google is stepping in to improve their mobile ad performance and user experience by altering how their ads operate on mobile devices.
Of course, Google has been trying to fight back against accidental mobile clicks for a considerable time now, but its recent announcement extends their initiative to its native ad formats. Before, their efforts were limited to just search and display ads. The search giant says they are stepping up their efforts because accidental clicks and taps are bad for everyone. Beyond simply being an inconvenience for advertisers and users, Google says accidental taps also drive down the value of ads.
“When we look at the effect for advertisers in mobile apps, we observe double the value per click,” Google said in a blog post. “We work hard to ensure that the clicks advertisers are charged for are more meaningful, and we hope sharing insight on these protections helps raise awareness and guide the wider advertising ecosystem.”
The changes being rolled out to native ads prevents accidental clicks in a few ways. First, Google ignores any clicks that are unusually fast, comparing itself to a professional baseball player having 680 milliseconds to tell whether they should swing at a pitch.
“That’s fast, even for a professional who’s paying close attention to hitting the ball,” Google said. “We think it’s virtually impossible for someone to read, understand, and take action on an ad in that amount of time.”
Additionally, Google says it will ignore when a user likely accidentally taps on an ad by excluding clicks on the edge of an ad. According to the search engine, clicks on the middle of an ad are associated with “dramatically higher” conservation rates and show much higher intentionality than those on the edge of ads.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-05-10 13:46:092016-05-10 13:46:09Google Ramps Up The Fight Against Accidental Ad Clicks
A new type of ad has arrived at Snapchat. The social imaging platform has recently been diving into monetizing content on its platform. Their latest venture allows retailers to share ‘shoppable ads’ on the app, which allow users to shop for products without ever leaving Snapchat.
The ads appeared for the first time recently within Cosmopolitan’s Discover channel. Both Target and Lancome launched shoppable Snapchat ads that run 10 seconds and are shown between Cosmo’s normal article and video content.
If users are interested in the products or services shown in these ads, they can swipe up at any time to be taken to an in-app mobile site to purchase the featured products.
Just as with normal Snapchat content, shoppable ads are limited to 10 seconds long. Longer ‘snaps’ and ads are likely on the horizon as Snapchat has recently been experimenting with longer video formats.
To help drive excitement for the social ad platform, Snapchat also announced that users watch over 10 billion videos every day, with 60 percent of daily active users creating and sharing their own content every day.
Advertisers are seeing more value in online video ads than traditional TV advertising, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureaus’ third annual Video Ad Spend study.
The annual survey asks 360 marketing and media buying professionals about their past ad spend habits and how they plan to spend their ad budgets in the next year. The takeaway from this year’s findings is that advertisers are moving away from traditional advertising channels in order to reach the more diverse audience online.
“Marketers and agencies are telling us they clearly see great value in original digital video programming,” said Anna Bager, svp and general manager of mobile and video at IAB.
The majority of advertisers surveyed by IAB (72%) said they plan to move advertising spending away from TV ads in favor of focusing on improving and sharing digital ads in the next year.
Out of those advertisers who said they intend to increase their digital video spending, 41% said they plan to pull from cable TV advertising. Similarly, 47% of these advertisers plan to pull from broadcast TB spending.
Some advertisers said they would also pull from non-video ads online (30%), advanced-interactive TV (30%), and mobile video ads (28%).
Most tellingly, more than two-thirds of advertisers and marketers (68%) said they believe original digital video will be as, if not more, important than, original TV programming within three to five years.
The study also found that advertisers and media buyers have increased their overall investments in digital video by more than 114 percent over the past two years, averaging more than $10 million annually spent on digital video.
https://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/OnlineVideo.jpg00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-05-03 11:21:302016-05-03 11:21:30Video Advertisers Say Online Video Budgets Will Soon Rival TV Ads
Every year Bing likes to highlight its efforts to keep the web safe with its “Bad Ads Report” and this year shows that the endless war against online scammers and hackers has remained largely consistent recently.
Despite constant efforts to derail the malicious actors on their platform, tech support scams and purposely misleading ads remain the biggest problems on Bing Ads. The company blocked over 15 million ads for running tech support scams alone.
Overall, Bing says it has rejected over 250 million ads in the past year, as well as blocking 50,000 sites, and banning 150,000 ads for breaking their guidelines.
Considering Bing’s trademark usage policies are relatively loose compared to competitors like Google, it comes as a surprise that the company says it dismissed more than 50 million ads in 2015 for trademark infringements.
The rest of the report is less surprising. Phishing attacks remain a relatively minor issue, and pharma and counterfeit goods are still being delisted by the hundreds of thousands.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-05-02 12:31:512016-05-02 12:31:51Bing Details How It Fought Bad Ads In 2015
The internet is becoming more mobile every day, and that goes for how we engage with videos every day. To help advertisers accommodate mobile video consumption, YouTube has announced a new ad format designed specifically to be quickly consumed in a matter of seconds.
With YouTube’s “little haikus of video ads”, which are officially called ‘Bumper Ads’, advertisers can run short, unskippable ads up to six seconds long that run before videos. While these are similar to YouTube’s skippable TrueView ads, Bumper ads are capped at six seconds and aimed at catching people’s short attention spans on mobile devices.
The new ad format will start rolling out to advertisers this month and can be purchased through the normal AdWords platform.
You can see two examples of Bumper ads below – one from Audi Germany and another for Atlantic Records advertising a new album from English band Rudimental.
“Bumper ads are ideal for driving incremental reach and frequency, especially on mobile, where ‘snackable videos’ perform well,” Zach Lupei, product manager of video ads at Google, said in a blog post. “In early tests, Bumpers drove strong lift in upper funnel metrics like recall, awareness and consideration—complementing TrueView’s strength in driving middle and lower funnel metrics like favorability and purchase intent.”
When it comes to search results pages, everyone wants the top spot. That goes for advertisers as well. But, a new analysis from Adobe Media Optimizer suggests the first ad on the page might not always be the best for your dollar. In fact, the 4th position may produce the best results in some situations.
The only catch is that sometimes Google doesn’t display the fourth ad.
According to the findings published in Adobe’s April 2016 Advertising Report, cost per click (CPC) is down ever since Google removed ads from the right side of the page. Meanwhile, click-through rates (CTR) has gone up.
The Adobe Advertising Report reviews three months of aggregated anonymous data from search advertising customers. The company specifically says they hoped this particular assessment would help customers understand Google’s decision to cut ads from the right-hand rail of desktop search results in February of this year.
Overall, the analysis found the changes impact smaller advertisers more because these advertisers generally depend on lower volume keywords. Due to the removal of the right-rail ads, smaller advertisers are having to pay our more to reach the top spots. They are also seeing 10% fewer clicks for less expensive keywords that appear in the lower ad spots.
The results also show that costs per click have risen for the number 1 and 2 positions by 6% and 7% respectively. Meanwhile, costs for the 3rd and 4th positions dropped by 8% and 10% respectively, showing advertisers are placing more of an emphasis on reaching the top spots.
Despite this, the lower positions are actually producing better click-through rates. CTRs for the 4th position jumped by 18% while the rates for the 1st and 3rd position rose by 13% and 2% respectively. Rates for the 2nd position have remained the same.
When all this is taken together it shows that the lowest spots on the AdWords results may provide the best value for advertisers, especially small businesses who are advertising on the platform. The results also suggest customers are responding well to the removal of right sidebar ads and engaging in ads more overall.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-04-26 12:17:522016-04-26 12:17:52First Isn’t Always Best When It Comes To AdWords Ads
In the past, Google AdWords used a complex and confusing algorithm for deciding when to display ad extensions. Recently, the company changed this by introducing a new policy which adjusts the impact of ad formats in the ad rank formula and allows AdWords to provide an estimate of how visible an ad would be on search engine results pages (SERPs).
As of now, an ad’s visibility will depend on ad position and ad formats, meaning ads with higher positions in the SERPs will display more ad extensions than ads in lower positions. This is a shift away from past systems which allowed lower ranked ads to show more ad formats than those above them.
The term ‘ad formats’ refers specifically to visual extensions that appear on ads in search results that display extra information about a business, including phone numbers, addresses, consumer ratings, and more.
In a way, this change ads even more incentive for businesses to make sure they get the top rankings in search results pages, as they will be rewarded by having it be more likely their ad extensions are shown along with their ad. Those who are able to score the top spots will certainly be happy with the change, though, as it means they are less likely to be outshined by a lower ad on the page.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-04-20 15:00:272016-04-20 15:00:27AdWords Changes Its Ad Rank Formula, Rewards Top Spots With Ad Extensions
Google is continuing its efforts to combat online display advertising fraud, with new defenses against a scam technique known as clickjacking.
If you’ve ever tried to press play on a video, open a link, or start a song and wound up on another page unexpectedly, clickjacking is most likely the culprit.
This is done by overlaying an essentially transparent layer over a legitimate web page. This way everything looks normal, but as soon as you try to take any form of action you trigger a behavior on the transparent overlay. The action may be used to trigger one-click orders from Amazon, take you to malware-laden sites, gain Facebook or Twitter likes, commit ad fraud, or any number of malicious behavior.
To fight back against this, Google is removing publishers engaged in clickjacking from its network entirely. The company has also developed a new filter specifically to exclude invalid traffic on display ads from clickjacked pages on both mobile and desktop.
In a blog post about the new efforts to fight clickjacking, Andres Ferrate, Chief Advocate of Ad Traffic Quality at Google, explained:
When our system detects a Clickjacking attempt, we zero-in on the traffic attributed to that placement, and remove it from upcoming payment reports to ensure that advertisers are not charged for those clicks.
00Taylor Ballhttps://www.tulsamarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/TMO-Logo.pngTaylor Ball2016-04-18 11:30:392016-04-18 11:30:39Google Beefs Up Its Defense Against Clickjacking
