Author: Neha Mehta

Digital Advertising v/s Digital Marketing: Know the Difference.

In this digital age, marketing is no more a choice but a prerequisite for businesses who are leaving no stone unturned to get their message across to the customers effectively and powerfully.

Then the question arises, in order to put forward the message in the right way to the right people, which one to go for? 

Marketing or Advertising?

Well, aren’t they both the same?  The answer is ‘No’.

There is a thin line of difference between them. This article will help you to understand it and justify the answer to the above question.

Know the basics-

Digital Advertising:

It is also called online advertising, web advertising or internet advertising

Digital advertising is defined as a form of marketing or advertising where businesses leverage internet technologies to deliver their promotional advertisements to customers.

In simple words, if you see an ad on the internet, it is called digital advertising.

There are three types of digital advertising:

1. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads: (Adwords search ads, bing ads, etc)

For example, the ads you see in search results.

                                Image Credit: Wordstream

2. Display ads : (Banners, video, mobile, pop-ups, etc)

For example, this ad by eBay is promoting its products. eBay is the biggest player in banner advertising and invests a lot of money in display advertising.

Image Credit: Bannernack

3. Social ads: (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc)

For example, A ‘suggested post’ on Facebook is a social ad.

Image Credit: Social Media Examiner

Digital Marketing:

Digital Marketing includes all the marketing efforts using the internet or digital technologies. Businesses leverage digital channels like emails, search engines, websites, social media, blog posts, logos, and everything else that is helpful in online promotion and connect with current and prospective customers.

There are six types of digital marketing:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
2. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
3. Content Marketing
4. Email and Mobile Marketing
5. Affiliate Marketing
6. Online advertising

The following infographic explains digital marketing in detail:

Image Credit: Smart insights

Now that we know the key processes in each segment, let’s look at the major differences –

• Digital Advertising is a part of Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing is a broader term whereas digital advertising is a part of it. This raises a question,

Is digital advertising necessary for your business?

Not really. Your business can survive without digital advertising. 

Why and How?

The definitions make it clear that digital advertising is a subset of digital marketing. When you start with a business idea, from that very moment you are involved in marketing and not advertising.

Product creation, Product Pricing, Packaging, Promotion, market segmentation, target audience are all a part of your business strategy and marketing mix.

  Image Credit: BBC UK

Digital advertising is part of the marketing mix. It comes into play when you use the internet to promote your product or service or to generate traffic. However, you can also choose from other tactics – a search engine, content management, social media, email marketing, etc to generate traffic.

It is not necessary to use digital advertising at the promotion stage to reach your target audience. 

For instance, DemandBase in one of the campaigns used white papers, infographics, Slideshare, and webinars to generate new leads. This helped the company to generate over $1 million in new revenue through content marketing resulting in 1700 new leads and connect with 125 webinar viewers.

You can run your business without digital advertising but not digital marketing. The purpose of all marketing techniques is to generate leads and generate traffic and so you can choose any tactic – SEO or PPC or both whichever helps to grow your business.

• Digital Advertising is an activity while digital marketing is a process: 

Digital marketing helps to build a strategy to market your business in the following way:

• Define your target audience,
• Ways to attract, engage, convert and retain the customers, 
• Evaluate existing and new digital channels like SEO, PPC, content marketing, etc
• Analysis and monitoring

In broader terms, digital marketing is a process that runs your entire business on the internet and it begins from the moment you start with the business idea.

       Image Credit: Abhiseo

The digital marketing process is continuous. It begins with the research phase and continues until the refining stage and the data from the refining stage is used again for the research to develop a new marketing strategy. It is a perpetual and never-ending process.

Digital advertising is an activity in the digital marketing process. It fits at Step 6: Promote- the purpose is to promote your primary digital identities (blog, website, app, product or anything else) via ads to relevant people in order to generate traffic. To do this, a digital advertiser will need inputs from a digital marketer on what to promote, who to promote, advertising budget, etc. An advertiser will accordingly create an ad to generate traffic.

• Digital advertising is tactics while digital marketing is strategic

A strategy is a long term and complex plan which involves decision-making at various levels while a tactic is a short-term plan or means to achieve the desired result. 

Digital advertising is tactical in nature as the promotion of a particular product or an offer to the target audience is momentary and short term. Subsequently, it can be easily replicated by competitors.

For instance, Facebook ads are short-lived. You might run an ad on Facebook to promote your product or an offer during Easter. Once you achieve the goal from the campaign, you will discontinue it and move on with another ad campaign or platform.

Whereas, digital marketing is strategic in nature that involves long term planning, projections, defined goals and objectives, budgets and resources to achieve the objectives.

For instance, Slack is a collaboration tool that allows teams to share files and communicate easily. They had an amazing rise at the launch with 15000 users in 2014 to over 500,000 in less than a year, and currently holds nearly one and a half millions of which are paid accounts.

Their strategy was clear from day one – focusing on the customer experience. They believe in selling solutions and not products. The company acknowledges to 8000 help desk tickets and up to 10,000 tweets every month.

This is what digital marketing plan does versus a digital advertising campaign that shows results instantly.

A digital ad campaign if fails will not impact the business overall but if digital marketing campaign fails it will affect the running of the business immensely.

• Digital advertising promotes the brand while digital marketing develops the brand image.

Digital Advertising promotes a brand, product or services. A compelling ad engages the customers, generates leads and creates brand awareness.

For instance, Typeform, a survey software company offers a freemium option with a condition that customers should include a thank-you page that includes its logo and message. It is a win-win situation that helps customers get to know the product for free and the brand gets free advertising. 

              Image Credit: ThinkIt Training Institute

Digital marketing builds a brand and brand image with a strategy in place. You plan the logo, design, taglines for your brand. You will develop a strategy on how your brand will be perceived by the target audience and what message your brand will convey to the target audience. It is a long term planning to build a robust brand image based on values and ethics that remain etched in the minds of the consumers.

• Digital Advertising is sales centred while digital marketing is audience psychology centred.

Digital marketing is not always sales-driven. The ultimate goal is to increase your ROI and sales but along with building a relationship with the target audience.

Let’s say you write a blog and publish it not only to increase traffic and revenue but build a relationship with your readers. This is what digital marketing does, it is based on audience psychology. To understand your target audience, their needs, and wants, it is essential to know audience psychology.

On the contrary, digital advertising focuses on a specific segment of the target audience that can be reached via ads. For instance, if you pay $50 for a $5 CPM slot, you are content as long as you get your 5000 impressions. In digital advertising, you are not much concerned about who sees it as long as the ad is performing and reaches out to the people.

Conclusion-

After reading this article, you may now have a clear idea about digital marketing and digital advertising. They are not the same and has an individual role to play.  Let’s have a short recap to have no doubts in mind.

IAS Issues Threat Alert Regarding The Latest Digital Ad fraud Scheme

The industry’s key weapon against ad fraud has been compromised, allowing fraudsters to pilfer media spend. Ad. txt files were ideally launched three years ago by the IAB’s Tech Lab to help the ad industry combat ad fraud but instead has become a conduit for it. 

It is an initiative to improve transparency in programmatic advertising. The tool was introduced by IAB for publishers and distributors to list all companies that are authorized to sell ads. Essentially, it will also show when an advertiser buys ads directly from the publishers or authorized ad tech vendors and also highlight those sites that do not use an ads.txt file.

However, in reality, since the ad.txt tool launched, fraudsters have exploited the opportunity where the buyers do not check the lists with bots that generate fake browser data and create fabricated URLs in order to steal advertiser’s media spend. 404bot is the perfect example of this type of fraud.

This botnet involves a practice called domain spoofing, where the fraudster impersonates the publisher’s webpage. However, the 404bot holds no inventory. Domain spoofing allows slipping nonexisting URL into approved domain lists. To avoid any detection, the fake URL is a combination of two existing URLs. 

    Image Credit: Campaign India

Now spoof domains are receiving ad calls, the challenge is to deceive the audience to ‘ watch’  the video ads. For this, 404 takes advantage of a Bunitu Trojan. The Trojan infects internet users with malware that allows fraudsters to connect to their devices. Once connected, the fraudster can use the infected ID to generate ad calls that appear from legitimate sources. The whole process of buying ads from the seller and inventory appears to be legitimate while there is nothing in reality.

Integral Ad Science(IAS) has uncovered the bot scheme that has affected many high and low publishers which have one thing in common: large ads txt list and has stolen at least US$15 million of advertiser’s money- a number that continues to grow. 

The fraud scheme is similar to 3ve and Hyphbot, the main signature of the 404bot is extensive domain-spoofing, where URL is fabricated at browser level which means the data from the browsers is fake. 404bot has been building networks gradually over the years ensuring that they are not easily detectable to the human eye.

Botnet’s Origin:

The IAS Threat Lab first spotted a rise in domain spoofing activity in 2018. Evgeny Shmelkov, head of the IAS Threat Lab said,

“We detect bots and protect our customers from their effects every day. The 404bot has been active since 2018 and its unchecked growth now warrants industry action.”

In September 2018, the botnet activity increased and remained high till the start of November 2018, when it abruptly dropped. However, around the same time another botnet, 3ve was taken down by cybersecurity and ad verification firm White Ops. IAS assumed both events were related, but the timing of 3ve takedown didn’t match with the drop in activity of the botnet it was monitoring. After 5 months of low activity, 404bot traffic increased again in mid-April, 2019 and then dropped in September 2019.

Image Credit: Campaign India

In its white paper, IAS explains,

“We can only hypothesise the true reason for this subsequent drop in activity of the botnet, but based on/ previous observation, we know that 404bot activity could spike again at any time.”

Conservative estimates suggest that 404bot’s activity between April 2019 to September 2019 affected over 600 million ads. It has affected over 1.5 billion video ads across the U.K, the U.S.A, Canada, and Australia. Assuming video ads price in a single-digit dollar, an average individual fraudster makes at least $15 million a year.

Drawbacks of Ads.Text files

The 404bot capitalizes on unaudited ads.text files and its vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, ads.txt files continue to be longer and become an easier place for fraudsters to hide. The longer the ads.txt list, the harder to audit for unauthorized sellers. According to IAS, the only link between all publishers that were impersonated by the bot was that they all had long lists of ad tech vendors in their ad.txts files. Evgeny Shmelkov said,

“This discovery left us wondering if publishers were not properly vetting resellers, or if they were simply using Ads.txt on their websites as a formality. The former, if true, defeats the core purpose of Ads.txt’s existence.” 

“We are learning from this bot that it is crucial to continuously audit and update Ads.txt files.”

The IAS threat lab detects bots regularly and to reduce unnecessary panic, it refrains to divulge details from every discovery. However, due to no sign of 404bot shutting down, IAS is sharing details to help other players in the ad-tech ecosystem to clean up the inventory. They are closely working with publishers and IAB Tech Lab to improve the ads.txt model to limit frauds like 404bot. 

Meanwhile, Dan Larden, managing partner of product and partnerships at programmatic agency Infectious Media said, companies buying and selling media aren’t set up properly to audit any trade. He further added,

“Programmatic advertisers need to be pushing ad tech vendors for more log-level data so that they can see where the wastage is on the media that’s being bought.”

Amazon Tests Customer Service Chat bots With Original Dialogue Capability

Amazon takes one more step towards its mission of being ‘Earth’s most customer-centric company’ by working on commercial service customer chatbot to generate original dialogue in real-time using recent major developments in AI language. 

The retail giant said that most text-based online customer service system includes automated agents that can handle simple requests. Generally, these agents are governed by rules – flow charts that have specific answers to particular customer input. If any other request that does not follow under the flowchart, the automated agent transfers the request to the human customer service representative. So, now the company is rolling out a separate consumer-facing chatbot that uses neural networks than rules to match human-authored response template to customer requests.

This project marks one of the first tests in the customer service market with modern and new natural language processing technology that researchers believe has the power to boost the progress in this field. This model has leading-edge systems like OpenAI’s GPT-2 that draws on massive training datasets and predictive texts to generate realistic dialogues.

Most chatbots in the market today despite technological advancements in machine learning still run on automation than AI. While Microsoft’s DialoGPT has used a new language for a generative chatbot before, they are yet to see a commercial application.

Jared Kramer, an applied-science manager on Amazon’s Customer Service Tech team wrote in a blog post,

“It is difficult to determine what types of conversational models other customer service systems are running, but we are unaware of any announced deployments of end-to-end, neural-network-based dialogue models like ours”

According to the research paper, Amazon is hoping to safeguard its generative model for a chatbot with Response-ranking AI. In this scenario, a generative AI will list down possible responses to customer requests and a neural network will select the most pertinent response. Each model is trained on approximately 5 million conversation-response pairs from around 350,000 past interactions related to specific customer service issues.

Presently, random trails consist of two types of customer service issues: return refund status and order cancellations. An internal metric is used to measure the success of the new AI chatbots. According to the metric, the new AI chatbots have significantly outperformed the old ones that account for the successful completion of the transaction and whether customers have to follow up within 24 hours.

Creating Stunning Visuals That Also Deliver Results Is A Science. Today, We Decode It.

Good advertising is not always about selling a product but creating a long-lasting impact and that is precisely what visual adverts do. An attention-grabbing image has been proven to increase engagement and performance. 

The world is now more visual than ever before.

The old adage ‘Picture speaks a thousand words’ is certainly true in this digital era. Check out the key findings below to comprehend the power of Visuals.

Image Credit: Mdg Advertising

However, visual creative advertising can fail if the various elements like the subject, color, lighting, focus, the text are not optimized. There is a reason why visuals are more compelling than text. It taps into the ‘consumer psychology’ and influences their buying behavior. This psychological effect can be created through colors, repetition, or call-to-action.

1. Color: There is a science behind how emotions react to various colors. When you create your visuals, you just don’t put colors but use them to create an emotional response. When your brain sees an image, it subconsciously decides whether the content is important or not. This is the impact of colors on the mood and where colors and creative advertising merge together.

The psychological effect of colors is used in branding and designing ads.

• Branding: Brands have always called on colors while creating their own identities. According to the infographic by Kissmetrics.com reveals color influences 85% of a customer purchasing decision. Some brands opt for bright and bold colors while some go for subtle colors pointing the emotions the product brings out. Brands like Google or Microsoft have multicolor accentuating that their product embraces any emotion anytime.

Image Credit: Blueberry labs

• Ads: While designing an ad knowing your target audience is essential to build the correct color scheme. For example, men and women have different color preferences. If your product is feminine and targeted for girls/ women then pink is the color to highlight.

                                                                  Image Credit: Kissmetrics

2. Call-to-action is heard and attended 

Naturally, CTA is an important element in your visual creative advertising. For example, a company found a 245% increase in leads after optimizing the landing pages. Make sure to keep your ad copy crisp with minimum textual content. Let your visuals do all the talking.

Ensure visuals take the center stage, followed by text to guide the users to take the next step and focus on optimizing it. You should end up with something like this:

                               Image Credit: Bannersnack

As you can see, the ad features the product image and call-to-action is in front and center to get attention immediately.

3. Repetition:

The trick of repetition works to build memories and equally, is an essential element of visual creative advertising. Repeated elements create easy brand recall but build variations to avoid fatigue.

Image Visme.co

4. Ownership of the Visual creatives:

Whenever someone looks at your ad and say, “Oh! I think to have seen this before”. This moment you lose the ownership of the ad. It is common to use images from the internet for ads but doesn’t help and loses its unique appeal.

Here, ownership comes into the picture and additionally helps to make brand memorable. For instance, when you look at BuzzSumo ad, there is the same character in all their visuals. Easily, you recognize the brand seeing the character. Three things in one creative: Repetition, Recognition, and Ownership. 

Image Credit: Buzzsumo

Choosing the right images is the key in Creative Advertising

While preparing for an advertising campaign, the right choice of images is vital. People are visual by nature. With shorter attention spans, images express ample of information with a quick glance and subsequently highly effective.

The target audience is drawn to images that are attention-seeking and compelling. The popularity of Instagram says it all. The image-sharing platform has 1 billion monthly active users and it is a fact that businesses are using it to run their ad campaigns. Do not undermine the power of images!

But, how effective is it to have a great image?  To answer this, here are the Instagram statistics and insights of businesses using IG for their creative digital advertising.

• ⅓ of the most viewed stories are from businesses – Instagram started with IG business Profiles to help businesses to grow and advertise. An estimated 71% of US business uses IG.
• Photos with faces get 38% more likes:  Adding faces to your image increases the scope of positive response, so include people in your campaigns.
• Instagram generates 4x more interactions compared to Facebook: IG engagement rate is on the rise and has increased by 29% between October 2017 and May 2018. With increased engagement, advertisers are spending more on Instagram.
• 83% of users discover new products and services on Instagram:  This implies that apart from being a discovery engine for brands, it has a strong impact on people’s shopping journey.    
• 65% of the most prominent posts feature product: The target audience wants to see the product and know what it has to offer.     
• Photos posts drive more engagement than video: The engagement rate of the image is more than videos,1.03 %. Videos attract more comments and images draw likes.

Examples of Visual in Creative Advertising Campaigns

• Powerful Images

Lemon and Line: The accessory maker has chosen the right image with the right color palette and the whole ad is compelling. Red, Blue and yellow are the right mix of primary colors, creating a high contrast but maintaining a strong balance. The highlighting point is the product is seen on the model’s wrist still it is a part of the whole image and not the focus.

Image Credit: Ad Expresso

• Visual Metaphor

It can be created by looking for the element to mimic the actual situation. Simple but out of the box concept to attract eyeballs and deliver a strong message.

Image Credit: Visme .Co

In this ad, the message is loud and clear whereas the human helmet becomes the visual metaphor. The elements like color, font, lightning can be tweaked.

• Video Advertising

Volvo Trucks: Videos supports explaining big messages in a few frames. Technically, you simplify the idea compared to an image or GIF. in this ad, Jean-Claude Van Damme performs a split. With this ad, Volvo trucks try to demonstrate the sturdiness and stability of the truck’s steering. Youtube responded that when an ad is successful, people search it online on Google and not when it pops out before any video.

This is what every ad should aim for creative space to visit again.

In Closing

Good design can help you to widen your reach and grow. Effective visual adverts are a combination of many elements like color, images, text, lightning or platforms. 

Focus and optimize the visual creatives for a positive impact. When advertising visually, ensure to use your own images as far as possible. Use attention-grabbing images to boost engagement.

7 Tips That Saves A Fortune On Your Pay Per Click Budget

On average, Google Ads advertisers receive $2 revenue on every $1 spent. This means an advertiser can expect to make double the money invested on this platform but there is no guarantee. It is compelling but intimidating as well. 

Essentially, it is gambling. It is looking for your investment to pay off than making zero dollar profit. It is common to believe that you need higher investment for higher returns.

But the truth is:

You don’t need a big budget to generate sales. A low budget PPC campaign will also lead to effective results. Here is how you can do it.

7 Tips to get optimize your PPC campaign

1. Optimize Ad Copy to Increase CTR

One of the best ways to save money on Google Adwords is by writing a better ad copy. A poor ad copy will not bring you desired returns while a better ad copy will appeal to your audience, increase your click-through rate (CTR), and Quality Score. The quality of ad text is a major contributor to build your Quality score. The quality score has a direct link to the success of your PPC campaign and therefore, it makes sense to invest time to optimize your ad copy.

2. Set your daily maximum budget

Before starting with the campaign creation and actual investment, project your result in advance to keep realistic goals.

A low budget is not a cash cow but a relative term.

For instance, enter your maximum of the low-budget spend for a single day. If you can spend $150 per month, which implies $5 per day.

                                                          Image Credit: AdEspresso

The next step is to comprehend the common data-based averages to get an idea about the cost per click and whether it aligns with your budget.

                                                   Image Credit: AdEspresso

In Q1 of 2018, the average CPC’s were $2.76 and CTR was 4.23% on Google ads

3. Use Ad Extensions

The second money-saving tip is to use ad extensions that improve your CTR. It allows the audience to take direct action from the searches whether you want them to call your business, download your app, know your offers, locate you on maps, or visit your webpage. Extensions make your ad more competitive and encourage users to know more about your business.

Image Credit: Neil Patel

4.Geolocation:

The most overlooked but critical feature in AdWords. For example, a dentist in Boston doesn’t want the ad to appear in searches of dentists in  Los Angeles. 

In the campaign settings, advertisers can easily target a specific country, state, DMA, city, and even zip code. Radius targeting is also possible around specific addresses to get even more granular.

                                                           Image Credit: Wordstream

Geolocation settings are also important for businesses selling goods and services from a physical location to set optimal working hours of their operations.

5. Try out single keywords to target:

When you are on low budget campaigns on PPC, you cannot bid on multiple keywords to get results. It will narrow the spread of the result, need longer set up, unique landing pages raising your time, effort and cost. If you have a budget of $5 a day, it is futile to bid on ten keywords costing that amount for a single click. 

Use a ‘single, specific, good’ keyword. You shouldn’t be targeting head terms like helicopter skiing. Someone searching ‘Helicopter skiing’ has no idea what they want – they will click on your PPC ad, browse and then leave. 

The keynote is to be as specific as possible with the keyword. The more specific is your keyword or long-tail keywords, cheaper is the cost and better is the click-through rates and in return the quality score.

To calculate the effectiveness of your keyword bidding strategy, try this

Keyword searches x CTR = Estimated traffic

So what kind of keyword you should find?

Use the keyword research tool to unlock all keyword possibilities including new keyword niches and less common keywords that have the potential to drive traffic and conversions.

This tool gives you valuable data like bidding estimates for top bids and top spot bids considering the competition.

                                                                 Image Credit: AdEspresso

For instance, Look for a  medium volume with less competition keyword and search the results that match the intent. (Intent means what the searcher expects to achieve with the search.)

The search is “Best CRM” which means the searcher is looking for the rankings of CRM’s and not the CRM product that is claiming to be the best.

                               Image Credit: Ad Espresso

6. Call-only campaigns:

Call only ads are ideal for advertisers trying to generate phone calls from their PPC campaigns. Some businesses with smaller budgets have challenges with landing pages. Visitors might abandon their shopping cart or download or anything if directed to a landing page at any stage of the conversion process with the risk that they may not complete the activity. Therefore, call-only campaigns enable users to call you directly by clicking on the ad. Furthermore, the finest part of these ads is that they appear only on those mobile devices that are capable of making calls. Hence, you will not squander money on unsuitable devices.

Don’t miss the opportunity on prospective customers by directing to landing pages which may never complete.

Image Credit: Wordstream

7.Ad Scheduling

Ad Scheduling is essential to control your budget, especially if funds are tight. Similar to geolocation settings, dayparting or ad scheduling help you maximize your business visibility at a certain time when your customers are online.

                                                  Image Credit: Wordstream

For instance, if your store is open between 8.am to 5.00 p.m, Monday to Friday, set your ads to display during the working hours to drive the traffic. However, if you sell online, you are always open then you can set your ads when the customer traffic is at peak to avoid any negative ROI.

Ad scheduling in collaboration with geolocation, you can exercise strong control over where and when your ads are to be shown to the users while being careful not to hamper your efforts with excess control.

Final Words

It is not the budget that determines the success of your PPC campaigns but strategy. Google Ad words have many features to offer and you can gain impressive results on a tight budget.

It is sensible to start small and expand your reach with a limited budget once you comprehend which strategy works best for you. Spend time in your PPC account to identify the problematic areas and correct them. This will save you from any financial damage and give insight on the outcome of your strategy.

Relevant keywords, well-designed PPC strategy, and a good understanding of your target audience can aid the potential of your campaign even with a tight budget.

BackLite Media Launches Measurement Platform Utilising ‘Big Data’ in the UAE.

BackLite Media, a specialist out-of-home (OOH) outdoor advertising company has partnered with IQ Data to launch BackLite Intelligence, the MENA region’s highly innovative OOH advertising platform to utilize ‘‘big data’ on a local scale. 

The finest technology, deployed across BackLite’s whole OOH network, will add exemplary value to advertisers across Dubai and Abu Dhabi with an avant-garde audience measurement data, centered around behavioral data linked to the millions of people who see BackLite’s signs daily.

With the new system ‘BackLite Intelligence’, advertisers will get an advantage to understand who is viewing their content clearly, giving them the insight to find better ways to target the right demographics. It will help in measuring people whereabouts and show the advertisers and brands the right consumer profile to target for their future campaigns.

BackLite Intelligence will leverage over 1.2 billion mobile phone location signals per month within UAE, and map them across their outdoor network, to give advertisers tailored, detailed and inclusive data relating to each campaign. The data includes the viewership of each location by the day and night, key shopping behavior and in-depth demographic information. 

Aligned with the smart city vision of the UAE’s leadership, the new technology adopted by BackLite Intelligence will rightly integrate with the outdoor advertising which at present BackLite Media is installing at Sheikh Zayed Road, creating a smooth, fulfilling and enriched advertising experience for all.

The privacy of the audience is safe, while the new system is useful to the advertisers. No personal information like emails or contact number is passed to BackLite Intelligence or its partners. The information collected is GDPR compliant and data collected via a software development kit (SDK) which collects location signals that are installed across many apps.

 Bill Fordyce, CEO of BackLite Media, said,

“As the premier OOH media company in the UAE, we are committed to improving accountability and transparency and addressing long-held concerns on audience measurement. The launch of BackLite Intelligence with our partner IQ Data represents a significant milestone for the advertising industry in the region and underscores our commitment to providing the best-in-class technology and solutions to drive the greatest value for our advertisers. By linking this technology with our new digital signs on Sheikh Zayed Road, due to be installed ahead of Expo 2020, we believe the solutions provided by BackLite Intelligence will be a game-changer for our clients, enabling them to gather deeper insights that provide increased clarity for sales and marketing strategies and hard data to fuel better business decision-making.”

Dimitri Metaxas, Co-Founder & CEO of IQ data, said,

“Our partnership with BackLite marks the MENA region’s first-ever Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising measurement platform to utilize Big Data at scale. To ensure its ongoing success, we’ve leveraged over 1.2 billion mobile location signals generated per month within the UAE and mapped them across the entire BackLite OOH network in order to bring new levels of audience measurement and transparency into their products offering. We are excited to be working with an industry leader in BackLite who not only share our enthusiasm for innovation but also a commitment to improve OOH accountability to regional advertisers.”

15 Facebook Ad Copies For Your Next Ad Campaign! (Every Industry Could Take Some Inspiration)

As of October 2019 Survey by Hootsuite, Facebook’s potential advertising reach globally is 1.93 billion. 32% represent people over the age of 13.

                                                       Image Credit: Hootsuite

Statistics also reveal that the average user clicks 12 ads in 30 days, which shows people interaction with Facebook ads.

                                       Image Credit: Hootsuite

Facebook ads are piquing user’s interest. You will not only see visually appealing ads but also close to your interest. You will see ads of the brands or products which you might be thinking to buy or most interested in. This makes them compelling and engaging.

There is a lot of competition and only THE BEST Facebook ad examples get the 12 coveted clicks. In today’s article, we will take a look at some best Facebook ads I could find and list and examine what makes them effective. You can use them as a guide to comprehend what types of creative, copy and offers work the best to model the success of these campaigns and help to expand your customer base and generate desired returns.

15 Winning Facebook Ad examples 

1. Allbirds

                        Image Credit: Disruptive Advertising

• The animated character on the static shoe image grabs your attention.
• The testimonial in the form of a quote builds trust as people believe more in real testimonials or reviews than ad copies.
• It is eligible for returns if the gift isn’t comfortable or fit well.

2. Coschedule

          Image Credit: Social Media Examiner

• The colorful design of the ad captures the attention right from the start.
• Provides facts and data in the intro of the ad which establishes trust, targets the specific audience and provides the benefits of the product.
• The ad begins with a question, “ Ready to get organized?”- implies that they are promising a benefit to their target audience which might interest them to know more about your offer. The image of the editorial calendar explains how the product helps to achieve the promised benefits.

3. Best Buy

            Image Credit -Digital Marketer

• The best part of the ad is that it tells how you can use the product and not what product offers you.
• The video is attractive and compelling showing the unique quality of the product as well.

4.  James Allen Jewelry

         Image Credit: Disruptive Advertising

• An emotional and heart touching ad, connecting to the audience instantly.
• This video shows a man proposing to his girlfriend and imagining her showing off her ring to whoever she meets for the rest of her life.
• The joy and relief of having the ring on her hand outweigh the joy of saying yes.
• Well, in reality too an engagement ring is a very special piece of jewelry for a woman and this ad captures the emotion and moment very well.

5. FreshBooks

                         Image Credit: KlientBoost

• Straight and simple ad but with a powerful message. The start of the ad says ” FreshBooks makes online accounting easy so you can stay focused on running your business.” which defines their target audience clearly – people who spend more time on accounting than their business ie. small business owners.
• Well defined target audience, strong content, bright colors and relatable design are the USP of the ad. Research states people make up their minds within 90 seconds of their initial interactions with products or people.
  

6. Shopify

                         Image Credit: Karola Karlson

• Shopify announces new product Shopify pay in this ad for its new and existing prospects.
• The image shows the product and the headline explains the benefit of the product – accelerated payment option.

7. Purple Carrot

                           Image Credit: Disruptive Advertising

• Purple Carrot is a boxed meal-kit and with the holiday season approaching they are making a broad emotional appeal which is effective in this case.
• The carousel ads of multiple meals help in conversions as it shows the various options provided by Purple Carrot. For example, if someone doesn’t like any dish, there are other options for them. Carousel ads help in building potential customers.

8. Ocean Basket Mediterrasian

• Facebook Canvas Ads recently renamed as Instant Experiences is used in this example extensively. It offers a unique visual experience to the audience.
• The upbeat music to each slide, engaging and high-quality video, and intriguing content to explain what the brand has to offer. As you keep progressing in the video, you can see more information on the final product and just in time you see a CTA in the end.
• The ad includes carousel advertising and a full spectrum of social media interface. The idea of the ad is to give the audience a glimpse of Ocean’s Basket Sushi as a feast of flavors and enticing the heart and mouth with the delicacies.

9.  The New York Times

                           Image Credit: Hubspot

• This ad by the New York Times is a classic example of photo ads. The ad with an intriguing illustration depicts the audience – millennials. The drawing is visually compelling and non-traditional that immediately draws attention. 
• If the main product to advertise is a reading article then the publisher needs to be creative with images and they should complement the written content.
• The goal of the ad is increasing the page’s likes and the call-to-action compels to read more about the article.

10. Boston Sports Club

                     Image Credit: Hubspot

• Bustle boosted a post that promotes one of its articles on Facebook. It is already posted organically on the page and paying to boost it can highly benefit the content that has mass appeal.
• Bustle’s boosted ad attracts many Bustle and Amazon followers. We are familiar with the Amazon Prime logo and color, but it’s a neon sign in the image and a high number of examples pique viewers’ interest.
• It is a brilliant ad that creates curiosity in the minds of the audience and compels them to click and learn more about the article.

11. Bustle

                                    Image Credit: Hubspot

• Bustle boosted a post that promotes one of its articles on Facebook. It is already posted organically on the page and paying to boost it can highly benefit the content that has mass appeal.
• Bustle’s boosted ad attracts many Bustle and Amazon followers. We are familiar with the Amazon Prime logo and color, but it’s a neon sign in the image and a high number of examples pique viewers’ interest.
• It is a brilliant ad that creates curiosity in the minds of the audience and compels them to click and learn more about the article.

12. GlobeIn

                             Image Credit: Design Pickle

• GlobeIn handmade crafts sourced from different regions and delivered at the doorstep. The highlighting point of the ad is the message on how the product will benefit consumers and the community.
• People support and invest in socially conscious businesses that contribute to the betterment of society. The ad capitalizes on the idea that when a customer purchases the product, it supports fair trade, ethical wages, and hardworking, labor class people.
• The ad shows the unique work of artisans and makes an emotional appeal that helps to engage the audience.

13. Hygge Bands

         Image Credit: ROI Overload

• This slideshow ad show multiple images of people wearing different Hygge bands on their runs. Slideshow ads can be a substitute for video ads if you are short on budget. 
• The ad makes good use of emoji and shows the product in use making it relevant and relatable to the audience.
• The ad has a good deal to offer ‘Buy 1, Get 3 free’ which is tempting and encourages buying behavior.
• Another highlighting factor is the lifetime warranty, PayPal payment, and quick shipping. This gives potential customers the confidence to try the product if they are not aware of the brand.

14. Grammarly

https://www.facebook.com/grammarly/videos/295947004582379/?t=0

• Simple, Subtle, heart-touching and engaging- these adjectives define the ad. Grammarly has used a fascinating story of a user and elegantly woven into the product. The story complements the product naturally.
• The goal of Grammarly is branding and they have used a  storytelling approach that has reached around 5 million people.
• Always end your ad with a CTA and here it is “Write the future”. The engagement rate of this ad was very good and as reported by AdEspress, the video-view rate increased by 33% and cost-wise they landed $0.02 video-views and a CPC of $1.87.

15. Project Repat

              Image Credit: Sprout Social

• It is not necessary to have a massive budget for your ad creative. Project Repat goal is the find interested buyers who are unaware of personalized T-shirt quilts.
• Initially, for the holiday campaign, they used lead ads to target specific groups and built a 1% lookalike audience based on emails collected from the response from lead ads. Later, they tried different formats and styles but what clicked is the ad creative featuring user-generated content that entices viewer attention and converts. 
• They retargeted the ad across social media platforms to a Custom audience from the website and another Custom audience who had engaged with its ads by viewing, clicking or liking them. 
• The result was phenomenal with 3.2x quilts sold during the holiday season.

The Essentials of a Great Facebook Ad

Although the essence behind each ad is different, the elements more or less the same. Some of the key elements are:

• Headline: Title of the Ad
• Text: It appears directly above or below the image and a viewer notices the first thing. Keep it short and concise. 
• Description: Only if needed, you should use more text in your ad to describe the product in depth.
• Media: Image or Video used in an ad which engages more audience.
• Call-to-action: An excellent way to ensure the audience takes action after viewing the ad.
• Ready for Your Next Facebook Ad Campaign? 

With various Facebook Ads examples, I hope it sheds some light and helps you determine your strategy to create an engaging Facebook campaign and connect with your audience. Hopefully, these ads gave you an idea or inspiration that you can implement in your next Ad campaign because when it comes to creativity sky is the limit.

Digital Advertising Industry Plans To Replace Cookies With First-Party Data

As the third-party cookies crumble and in the wake of privacy regulation coming into effect, the online advertising industry is facing an identity crisis. They are in search of a new identity and one possible solution is people’s email addresses and phone numbers.

At the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Palm Springs, California, on 10th February, the IAB wants to partner across brands, agencies, publishers and tech companies to develop new means to power digital advertising.

“Project ReArc”, a chosen name for re-architecture, a critical part of their multi-phase plans to build a replacement for the third-party cookies presently blocked by Safari and Firefox browsers and Google Chrome to follow soon.

IAB Tech labs proposed to build a new identity based on e-mail addresses or phone numbers, which provide a constant and rational way of recognizing someone than the third-party cookie did,  without giving up on user’s privacy. 

The IAB and all the involved entities are supporting the future of online advertising based on email advertising and phone numbers. They have witnessed Facebook and Google dominate the online ad world thanks to their platforms logged-in user bases and see e-mail addresses and phone number identifiers as a way for the open web to rival the walled gardens.

However, Megan Pagliuca, Chief Media and Data Officer at Hearts & Science says the people with signed-in users are going to win. If grounding the identifier on first-party data will create a disadvantage for long-tail and mid-tier publishers as they don’t have a sizeable number of registers. It is also unlikely to benefit the open web as a whole.

To protect the advertising business, if publishers are pressured to compel users to provide their email address or phone numbers, it is highly possible that many sites will put content open after registration so that only logged-in users can access it. While this can be a precarious situation for publishers to gain user registries, it could also lead them to lose a part of their audience. As a result, there is a  potential negative impact on the small and mid-sized publishers leading to an unanticipated consequence.

A publishing executive asked earnestly, “Do ad networks have a chance of returning?”

Ad networks started for small publishers like individual bloggers and act as mediators between publishers and advertisers to curate ad inventory from publishers and sell to advertisers. Eventually, supply-side platforms came up and replaced ad networks with third-party cookies on these sites to auction off their inventory to sell targeted ads. However, without third-party cookies, these small publishers will face difficulties to collect email addresses or phone numbers and once again will have to be under the umbrella of the ad network. 

The primary reason for ad networks struggles to attract advertisers is generally they are not transparent about where an advertisers’ ad appeared. However, this is not true in the case of brand advertisers who care about the context in which their ads appear while performance advertisers care whether the ad drove sales or any conversion event.

I could see a world where performance buyers return to using ad networks because they don’t care about transparency,” said the unnamed SSP executive to Digiday.

The return of the ad network is a concern for publishers because of the possibility for ad networks to siphon some of their revenue. While some ad buyers direct their money to big publishers as they have signed-in users, others may see ad networks offering a lower price and move their money in that direction to become cost-effective. 

Do You Really Need To Blog To Get Rank #1 On Search Engines?

                                                     Image Credit: Pixabay

Many business owners quiver at the idea of blogging. “Do we really need to have a blog?” is the most obvious question. The answer is “YES”. It is the most efficient way to boost your SEO rankings. In this article, I aim to explain to you in detail the importance of blogging for SEO and how it makes your site favorable for Google to rank and increase your organic traffic.

You may have a million reasons to blog, some of them include building trust among the followers, positioning yourself as an experienced expert, and sharing news or know-how with your company’s followers.

Six Reasons Blogging is important for SEO

1. Provides fresh content:
Google tends to favor websites with a lot of ‘high-quality content’. You don’t change the pages on your websites often, hence writing a blog comes in the picture. Google loves fresh content whether you update your blog every day or every week. The highlighting point is the quality of the content which is the most important factor. Quantity of articles with low quality will not help or contribute to rankings. Focus on creating high-quality articles regularly and ensure you are optimizing each article for different keywords. Avoid writing articles with the same keyword as it competes with each other and limits your keyword ranking opportunities. Google doesn’t deliver outdated information to the searchers but regularly updated and fresh content sends signals to them that the site is working. It also gives search engine algorithms reasons to index your website more often. A Hubspot study reveals more often a company writes articles, more organic search traffic it receives.

                                      Image Credit: eWebscapes

2. Helps to implement long-tail keywords:
Keywords don’t hold the same weightage that they once did. Many people start SEO wanting to aim for the most relevant keywords for their business. For example, if you are selling ‘camping gadgets’ and show up on page one for the search ‘camping gadgets’.Unless you are the biggest brand for camping gadgets, you will find it difficult landing a top spot for the search. SEO is competitive and the best bet for the brands is to look for longer, specific keywords related to the business and try to rank those. These are called long-tail keywords. Blog posts on the website are an excellent way to use long-tail keywords.

For instance, a local store might be trying to rank the keyword ‘camping gadgets’ but also aiming to rank long-tail keyword ‘Gadgets for car camping’. This gives them a chance to write a blog post on ‘ Types of gadgets needed for car camping’ and link it to their product using the long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are extremely important for SEO strategy and studies suggest that 50 per cent of the searches are four words or longer. From the above example, we understand creating blog articles allows the site to rank many keywords. The traffic opportunity is more from these topics than on page three or four for using more popular terms. 

3. Google is a ‘Topical Match Engine’
Google is no longer looking for a large number of pages but for sites who are a book of knowledge on their topics. They have changed their algorithms and now understand the context of the whole topic, being a topical match engine versus a simple keyword match engine. This shows that having a single page or article with a single keyword around the topic is not sufficient for your site. You need to represent the topic more comprehensively to appear in Google search results.

Blogging provides an outstanding opportunity to demonstrate your thoughts and in-depth knowledge about a topic to your readers. Writing multiple articles covering different aspects of a subject and giving detailed insights about that topic shows Google that your site is worthy to come up in the search results for that topic. This gives a boost to the rankings of competitive content on your site.

4. Opportunities for backlinks:
A link for a link. A prominent way to get those links and increase the authority of your domain is by blogging. Look out for relevant blogs to link to your blog posts and they may provide a link to your website on theirs. These links have a direct effect on your rankings and help generate traffic to your website as well as other company’s site.

However, it is important to note that the process of gaining inbound links should be done naturally. If the website linked to your blogs or site has no relevance with your industry then it will violate Google’s terms of services and can lead to a high penalty situation.

Therefore, produce high-quality content often to earn inbound links organically and build a strong following on social media to share articles each time. Blogging increase chances to earn inbound links from other websites that is highly impactful for SEO.

Research shows that companies who blog get 97 per cent more links to their websites.

5. Increases interlinks:

SEO is so much about links and internal links and easiest to get as you create them for yourself. So, including internal link points users from one page of the site to another. As you add more pages to various but related topics, you can naturally link them to each other.

Every time you use anchor text to tell Google what page you are linking while building up its connection to your target keyword in how the algorithm sees it.

6. Shareable Posts:

When your target audience likes the blog post, they share it on social media. The more social media shares it gets, the more people will click, like and reshare, and explore other pages on your website. When you get a lot of traffic and get repeat visitors that tell Google – people like your website and raise your rankings and authority level in their algorithm.

Wrapping up

Blogging and SEO go hand-in-hand. Blogging consistently helps increase counts of keywords and pages, inbound links, and create comprehensive articles. Target audience loves to hear from you and Google loves your updated and relevant website. Search engines look for blogs that explain the premise of the subject that interest bloggers and you can take advantage of it to up your rankings. So get cranking on the blog posts