Display advertising in Russia: particularities
Display advertising on the Internet is a kind of mix that includes the main formats for submitting information. It includes text, audio-visual materials, and interactive elements. For example, a media page may contain branded videos, audio ads, banners, text ads, and so on. In the West, such a complex capture of target audience attention was dubbed the term display ads. In other words, any ad that we see or hear from the screen can be considered a display ad.
In Russia, this type of advertising is quietly popular because of its price (it isn’t very expensive) and variety of formats. First of all, let’s speak about its advantages and disadvantages.
Pros and cons
We will list just some of them which are the most important to set up this type of advertising.
The capture of attention
Users are more likely to click on a media page than on a regular text block. Animation, interactivity, sliders, and a survey increase the involvement of the target audience.
Price
In contextual advertising, the cost of placing ads is constantly increasing. Display advertising in ad networks is much cheaper.
Targeting
Targeting a relevant audience, which increases the effectiveness of the campaign.
The disadvantages include banner blindness – the tendency of users not to notice ads due to the overload of information flow. The intrusiveness of some types of ads does not cause the desired response from users.
Formats of display ads
It is mainly associated with the following formats for submitting information:
Offline
Outside of the Internet, advertising has all the characteristics of display ads, that is, it affects a person in a complex way, but without interactivity. The offline direction includes outdoor advertising (banners, banners, posters), print ads, TV shows, and internal advertising.
The advantages of this format are wide audience coverage. Disadvantages – lack of targeting and high cost. However, experts note that conservative methods give a good response in the regions of the Russian Federation. Using call tracking technology, you can track the effectiveness of offline ad sources.
Banners
They were the basis for online media advertising. This format is a graphic element that contains an image or animation. Blocks can be dynamic or static, and have fixed or floating sizes. Banner networks use the programmatic technology, which automatically detects the target audience of an ad message and offers users options for displaying ads: RTB auction or programmatic direct.
Types of banners:
- 1. Graphic-still image or simple gif animation;
2. Text and graphic – image and description;
3. A teaser block is often a shocking image with a provocative title;
4. Slider-the slot uses several creatives that change according to a schedule;
5. Expandable-stretchable banners;
6. Rich-media – a rich block of information that POPs up on top of the page content. Often contains an audio track. This format often irritates the audience, so use it only with a hot audience. Pop-up banners can appear when you hover the cursor, for example, on the « close » site icon or when scrolling with the mouse;
7. Full-screen – located on the entire width of the page background. They are often used to promote a brand or product on a website.
Text and image blocks
Advanced contextual ad format: short title, accompanying text, and subject image. The task of the block is to interest the user in a relevant offer so that they click on the banner. A classic example of where display ads are placed is the Yandex (Yan) and Google (CMS) partner networks. The same format is used for promotion in social networks.
Video advertising
Videos are used on channels inside the hosting companies themselves-YouTube, RuTube, Vimeo, and others, as well as in the body of banner slots. Videos qualitatively expand the reach of the audience.
Types of video ads in YouTube:
- 1. Ads in the form of screensavers. The maximum duration of the video is 6 seconds. The special feature is that the user can’t disable them. This approach clearly increases product and brand awareness.
2. In-Stream – these are small ad inserts in any place in the video. YouTube offers several options for this strategy: a video up to 20 seconds long without the possibility of skipping, as well as TrueView In-Stream – you can disable It after 5 seconds of viewing.
3. Out-Stream-shown on mobile gadgets. Viewing is paid if more than half of the video block was in the user’s field of view for at least 2 seconds.
4. TrueView Video Discovery is an analog of banner ads with descriptions on websites. YouTube shows similar videos in the right column for relevant user queries.
5. Branding. Display advertising uses ways to promote the brand by placing banners on the site’s background (full-screen view) and in the page body.
How to measure effectiveness?
Metrics of advertising campaigns are analyzed using Yandex.Metrics and Google Analytics. They also use automation systems for Yandex.Direct, and social networks-Alytics, eLama, Aori, and others. After getting the necessary data, you can measure the dynamics of sales for each traffic channel.
We learned what display advertising in Russia is. We studied the tasks and got acquainted with the types of media. We reviewed the advantages and disadvantages, as well as systems for analyzing metrics.