Without much fanfare, Amazon has managed to build a billion-dollar advertising business.
That’s not so surprising when one considers that, depending on who you ask, roughly 50% of consumers in the US start a product search on the company’s site or in its mobile app, and many more consult Amazon before finalizing a purchasing decision.
Display advertising is an important part of digital marketing, but deciding which platform to go with and how much budget to allocate is a tricky decision for advertisers.
In recent years real-time bidding (RTB) networks have sought to revolutionise the industry by allowing marketers to bid on how much they want to pay for specific consumers.
The power to deliver the right ad, to the right consumer, at the right time is an attractive proposition for marketers, so it’s no surprise that Facebook launched its own RTB network last month.
But with so much consumer data to play with and a number of different vendors to choose from, display can appear to be a complex marketing channel for advertisers.
To simplify the process, Criteo introduced a search-like performance model for display where advertisers only pay for engagements resulting from post-click conversions.
So to find out more about targeted ads, Facebook’s new RTB network and where display should fit into an attribution model, I spoke to Criteo’s managing director for Northern Europe and Benelux Michael Steckler.
A new report into the efficacy of banner ads claims to dispel myths about low CTRs and conversions.
Published by display ad firm Criteo, the report is essentially a rebuttal to a comScore research paper from 2008 entitled ‘How Online Advertising Works: Whither the Click?’
ComScore found that a small subset of people, less than 10% of all internet browsers, were responsible for more than 80% of all clicks.
It concluded that those who click on banner ads tend to be younger and with low income, so were “hardly an attractive target segment for most advertisers”.
Criteo disputes these findings, claiming that people who click ads are more likely to make a purchase, and the more ads a user clicks on the more products they will buy.
The report highlights several ‘myths’ about banner ads, and then seeks to dispel each one…
Online retailers are increasingly retargeting consumers on other websites when they have browsed on their own web properties but left without buying anything.
I’ve been asking three retargeting providers about how it works, why they think online retailers should adopt the tactic, and how they deal with consumers’ concerns about privacy.