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How to Align Your Banner Ads and Landing Pages

Written by Ted Dhanik

The Web is a busy place, especially on websites that have content and other banners competing for the attention of users. In addition, your space and visibility is further limited by the actual placements of your banner advertising. It’s important to know the tricks for aligning your banner advertising with your landing page so that you don’t waste the attention of a user when you happen to catch it.

Find the Purpose of the Ad

Your ad is the first contact a user makes with you and your brand. It’s a good chance to incorporate the colors and imagery that are associated with your brand: things like the logo or the color scheme. It’s also the first (and possibly only) shot you get at creating a call to action that actually drives users to do something.

Your ad copy must also explain what your product is and detail the problems it solves. All of this has to be done within just a few lines of text, or else you risk cluttering your ad with a lot of unnecessary copy. Once users have clicked on your ad, you get the opportunity to try to sell them on your products. This is where a solid landing page comes into play.

Define the Landing Page Role

In Internet marketing, we refer to a difference between two things that a user sees as a disconnect. An example of this would be copy that says “Buy Now” with a landing page that says “View Information.” The user is expecting to buy something, so offering information sets the whole operation back a step. If you determine the focus of your landing page, you’re less likely to suffer from this kind of aimless marketing.

Ask yourself what you want the user to do, then work on shortening the time between point A and point B. For instance, getting a user to buy something typically requires information like a shipping address and payment information. Therefore, you want to design your page so that the user is prompted for these items as soon as possible.

Test for Quality

Even Google tests its landing pages to see what changes they can make to improve conversions on a page. The key to improving any landing page with display advertising is to test and check your theories constantly. Through repeated testing you learn how to better optimize your ad, which calls to action are likely to work, and how to shorten or lengthen your sales funnel to improve conversions.

Bio: For over fifteen years, Ted Dhanik has been a thought leader in the sales and direct marketing space. Now, Ted Dhanik acts as the president and co-founder of engage:BDR. To supercharge your marketing campaigns with targeted traffic, visit Ted Dhanik online.

How to Get Started with Display Advertising

This article was written by Ted Dhanik.

Moving from search to banner advertising can be tricky. Some of the sales techniques you discovered in search may not apply to display marketing, so you need new testing. Getting started in this space without hemorrhaging money in the process is a difficult task for any company to undertake. Who you target and what you sell to them will determine how effective your advertising is over time. Before you spend on a campaign you haven’t thoroughly vetted, read on for tips that the pros use to evaluate their new campaigns.

Research Your Market

The more you know about your market, the more you can decrease the irrelevant traffic for a keyword. When you research keywords, try to look at what your competition is doing and mimic that. Do you notice any consistencies in the banners within your market, or do you see any particular keywords in high demand? You can also listen to your sales team and work within some of the common objections and complaints you encounter as you try and sell. Online surveys and focus groups can offer some intriguing insights, but if you need results now just call or talk to your customers and get feedback in the moment.

Identify Trends

Market trends allow you to effectively adapt to and follow what works. Good places to keep an eye on trends are the popular blogs in your industry, but you can spot them just by doing Google searches too. Review the display and search ads you find, look for commonalities and see what you can incorporate into your own work. Forums are another good source of trends for what works, or at least ideas on what to experiment with next.

Once you have some ideas to work with, focus on devising excellent A/B tests that measure the impact of your changes against what you already know will work.

Emulate the Competition

Chances are that your competitors have been in business longer than you have, but even if they haven’t, you can still see what they are working with. Tools online can help you view creatives, find which pages have the most active placements, and tell you the demographics of people who visit the pages you want to market on. If you see your competition buying up space on those pages, you have two choices: compete directly or seek some other source of traffic. Once you know what they consider successful, you have more information to try and emulate those techniques and placements.

Select Promotional Creative

Selecting the right promotional creative also makes a difference in display advertising, but this can be difficult for the newbies out there to handle. First thing to do is speak with your affiliate representative to find out which banner creative has the highest conversion rate. You can usually trust their advice because it is in everyone’s best interest for you to bring in more sales. Identify why the banner works and you can develop your own creative.

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Ted Dhanik is a thought leader in the display advertising space. As the co-founder of engage:BDR, Ted Dhanik has been a thought leader in direct marketing and sales. For information on improving your direct marketing campaigns, search Ted Dhanik online.

The Various Types of Display Advertising

Author bio: Guest post is submitted by Ted Dhanik, the president and co-founder of engage:BDR.  engage: BDR is a leading media company that offers marketing solutions for direct response marketers and advertisers.  Ted Dhanik has his Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Marketing from California State University, Hayward.  Ted Dhanik was previously the VP of Strategic Marketing for Myspace for over five years.

Display advertising online has become more and more popular in recent years.  Many researchers and experts have claimed that display ads are some of the most successful marketing tools on the market today.  There are four major types of display advertising, which include category, contextual, behavioral and retargeting.  This article will explain the various types of these ads and the benefits of each.

Category display ads are used quite often.  For example, if you were advertising a new makeup product, you would advertise on websites that are related to that category.  With this example, you would want to publish your display ads on sites that target female audiences, such as fashion or beauty sites.  Category display ads are essentially focused on your target audience.  Category display ads help to create brand recognition and usually include a wide variety of websites to choose from.

Retargeting display ads function slightly differently.  For example, if you were on Yelp earlier, you might see more Yelp ads while you search other websites.  Retargeting involves targeting previous visitors to a company’s website.  This type of advertising is normally more expensive than other kinds of advertising, and tends to target a smaller audience.  However, due to the established interest of the viewer, there is typically a greater ROI (return on investment).

Contextual display advertisements are somewhat similar to category ads.  For example, this might include an ad of the newest bag from a company that makes purses on a handbag forum.  In these examples, the display ad lines up directly with the content on the website, and it’s of direct interest to the visitors.  Contextual and category display ads are often combined for the best results.

Behavioral display advertising targets a specific demographic based on their web history.  Behavior display ads rely on cookies in order to function properly.  This type of advertising focuses on a small and specific audience, but there are more guaranteed customers due to the focus.  Many advertisers use behavioral targeting due to the higher rates of success.

Some companies will use all the various types of display advertising in order to ensure the highest amount of new customers and sales.  Display ads do require some thought and research, because they need to be interesting enough to entice the viewers.  Everything, from the message to the colors used in the ad, can have an impact on the viewers.

Investing in Web-based Sweepstakes Games

Owning an internet café franchise means more than offering people the ability to surf the web. These days a growing number of internet café owners are enhancing their services by adding sweepstakes games, or internet sweepstakes machines. These machines make it possible for consumers to purchase time through a kiosk and then use the time to play sweepstakes games on the computer. If you’re new to the industry, you might wonder which are the best sweepstakes games on the market? Here’s a look at how to find the best sweepstakes games for your internet café.

Say yes to web-based games. There are many different types of sweepstakes games on the market, making it difficult to find the best games. Before you go into the details, make sure that you only look at web-based games, or games that are built on a web platform. Web-based games are superior to other games for many reasons. First of all, web-based games are simply more powerful. This means that the games will play smoother and there will be less complaints and maintenance involved.

Web-based games are also more affordable. It’s easy to setup a game based on a web platform. It’s also easier to maintain it because there are automatic updates. Another benefit to web-based games is that customers can play them at home.

It’s easy to determine if a game is based on the internet. One way you can tell is if you can play the game at home on your own computer. This is a great way for you to ensure you’re dealing with a web-based game and that it’s interesting and/or fun to play.

Business Advantages of Utilizing Display Marketing

By Ted Dhanik

There are many advantages to the business who decides to purchase display marketing and go this route with its’ product.

The first one settles on the consumers. Most consumers are spending a lot of time online to buy products, research new ones, and compare prices. Internet searches and uses are a daily routine for the majority of people, and the exposure to it ranges from use on a handheld device to a computer in an office. Even television and radio do not have this extensive of a reach to consumers. So the first advantage of display marketing to a business is the potential wide reach of its message or product.

The second advantage to a business with display marketing is the low CPM turnover that can be associated with correct utilization of display marketing. Some display marketing companies are only there for the connections- to paste your ad on websites that have high users. However, this is not the most cost efficient way for a business’ ad to get traffic and generate sales. The best ROI for this lies in the dedication and effort to determine where the ad gets placed.

This is based on a host of information gathered about the customer. A business knows the profile of its primary customer and their target guest. Using this information will help dictate which sites contain these demographics, thereby leading high traffic with the desired persons. That is what creates a low CPM- because the high traffic consist of viewers that are interested in the product, and not just a high traffic site.

Guest post provided by Ted Dhanik, CEO of engage:BDR. Ted Dhanik offers his insights on display advertising in his professional blogs. Use Ted Dhanik when you need help with display advertising for your business.

An Internet Cafe Business Takes Many Shapes and Forms

Playing sweepstakes games is a great amount of fun, but what people don’t realize is that they can earn a lot of money if they set up an internet sweepstakes business. These sweepstakes games that customers play are offered by specific companies that can help set up the business. The profits earned are shaped proportionately between the café owner and the sweepstakes business in most instances.

Setting up a cafe is easy with only a space of about 1000 square feet enough to run the café. Sweepstakes machines need to be installed by the company on behalf of the café owner. These machines offer different games such as reel games and card games. The chances of winning increase according to the line-up of similar symbols in a particular row. Playing sweepstakes can be a ton of fun all on their own, but the chances of winning increase when people play more and more.

The machines work by installing internet café sweepstakes software. This software is simple to set up and use and there are prizes for winning the sweepstakes game. They are normally products such as video game consoles, coins to play more games, gift certificates,  and other alluring items. Sometimes customers can win even larger prizes such as vacations and cars. Normally the minimum, age of playing is 18 years.

The internet café owner can also fix the maximum number of entries per customer. Sweepstakes online café can also be opened without having physical space. The option to run an internet cafe online for customers to play the games from the comforts of one’s home is also available. This online business requires a website and a domain name which can be acquired easily from the domain service providers.

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