With the right approach, display marketing can be a highly effective way to connect with your audience at the right moment. Success depends on thoughtful targeting, engaging visuals, and ongoing optimisation. Whether you’re aiming to raise brand awareness, drive conversions, or build customer loyalty, a well-executed display campaign can deliver real results. Let’s break down the five key elements that make display marketing work:
1. Define clear goals
A successful display campaign begins with a clear objective. Are you aiming to build awareness, drive engagement, or boost conversions? Defining your primary goal sets the foundation for strategy, targeting, and creative execution. Here’s how to align objectives with the right tactics:
- Awareness: To maximise brand visibility, focus on broad audiences like affinity groups or in-market segments. Use impactful messaging and visuals designed to make a strong impression. Success is measured through impressions and reach.
- Engagement: To drive interactions, target audiences already showing interest in your brand. Personalised ads and compelling messaging can encourage clicks or sign-ups. Metrics like click-through rates (CTR) and time spent on-site gauge engagement.
- Conversions: For sales or leads, precision targeting is essential. Retargeting and lookalike audiences work well, paired with strong CTAs such as “Buy Now” or “Sign Up.” Measure success with metrics like conversion rates, return on ad spend (ROAS), or cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
- Product launches or promotions: Introducing a new product or running a promotion often combines awareness, engagement, and conversions. Create urgency with eye-catching visuals and time-sensitive messaging. Tailored strategies like remarketing lists can help reach high-intent users, with success tracked through short-term metrics like campaign-period sales or click-through rates.
2. Target strategically
Effective audience targeting is central to display marketing success, ensuring the right people see your ads. Broadly, there are two main types of targeting: prospecting and retargeting.
Prospecting audiences
Prospecting aims to reach new users unfamiliar with your brand, ideal for building awareness and expanding reach. Google’s audience targeting offers several ways to refine prospecting, including:
- Affinity audiences: Target users based on interests and hobbies. For example, a sports nutrition brand would target fitness enthusiasts.
- Custom segments: Create audiences using keywords, URLs, or apps related to your offering. This works well for niche markets or B2B campaigns.
- In-market audiences: Reach users actively researching products or services in your category. A travel company, for example, would target people planning holidays.
- Life events: Connect with users experiencing milestones like moving house, getting married, or starting a new job, making it particularly relevant for industries like home decor or financial services.
Retargeting audiences
Retargeting focuses on users who’ve already interacted with your brand, such as visiting your site, viewing a product, or abandoning a basket. With robust tracking, you can create specific retargeting segments like:
- Visitors who browsed but didn’t purchase.
- Customers ready for an upsell.
- Users who started but didn’t finish a form submission.
Personalised messaging makes retargeting more effective. For example, basket abandoners might respond to discounts or free shipping offers, encouraging them to complete their purchase.
3. Prioritise creative excellence
In display advertising, your creative is your chance to grab attention and make an impression – often the moment when potential customers decide whether to engage. High-quality visuals, engaging copy, and clear calls-to-action (CTAs) are essential. Tips for effective display ads include:
- Brand awareness campaigns: Use striking, recognisable visuals with consistent branding – logo, colours, and fonts. Headlines should quickly convey what makes your brand unique or trustworthy, such as “Handcrafted in Britain” or “Over 10,000 5-Star Reviews.” Pair bold imagery with messaging that reflects your identity.
- Retargeting campaigns: Personalisation is key. Show users the products they browsed but didn’t buy, with messages like “Forget something?” or “Last chance to get this!” Reignite interest and guide them back to complete their purchase.
- Dynamic ads: Automatically tailor content based on user behaviour. For example, display specific holiday packages a user explored, paired with pricing or offers. CTAs like “Plan Your Dream Getaway” or “Book Before Prices Rise” add urgency.
- Optimised designs: Ensure visuals are tailored to ad formats – banner, sidebar, or mobile. Headlines, imagery, and CTAs must remain clear and impactful, even at smaller sizes. Subtle animations or rotating images can capture attention without overwhelming.
Local In-Market Experts (LIMEs) help make sure your ads work in different markets. They adapt the language and pick imagery that feels right locally, adding an international touch to help your campaigns connect with all kinds of audiences.
4. Embrace testing and iteration
No matter how meticulously you plan your online display advertising campaign, not everything will unfold exactly as expected – and that’s normal. Continuous testing is the key to refining your strategy and improving performance over time. Key elements to test include:
- Headlines: Compare the effectiveness of direct calls to action (“Buy Now”) versus softer, more engaging messages (“Learn More” or “Discover More”).
- Visuals: Experiment with different styles, such as bold graphics, lifestyle imagery, product-focused shots, or even minimalistic designs, to identify what captures attention in your target markets.
- Placements: Test ad placements across a variety of platforms, websites, and apps. Experiment with specific categories, niches, or premium placements to identify high-performing channels.
- Formats: Compare static ads with dynamic or animated formats to determine which drives higher engagement or click-through rates.
- Ad sizes: Test different ad dimensions (e.g., banner, skyscraper, or square formats) to find out which performs best within your audience’s browsing experience.
- Colours and branding: Experiment with colour schemes and the prominence of your branding elements to see how they influence user response.
- Copy length: Test short, snappy ad copy versus more detailed messaging to see which resonates better with your audience.
- Audience segments: Create multiple versions of your ads tailored to different audience segments (e.g., age groups, interests, behaviours) to see which performs best.
- Timing and frequency: Test the time of day, day of the week, and frequency of ad delivery to optimise when and how often your audience sees your ads.
- Calls to action: Experiment with different CTAs, such as “Shop Now,” “Get Started,” “Sign Up Today,” or even curiosity-driven CTAs like “Find Out How.”
- Landing pages: Test which type of landing page your ads direct to – product  pages, blog content, lead capture forms, or category pages – and track which delivers the best results.
Tools like Google’s responsive display ads (RDAs) simplify the testing process by combining and optimising creative elements to achieve the best outcomes. Even when a test doesn’t deliver the expected results, it offers valuable insights into what doesn’t resonate with your audience – helping you continuously improve and refine your campaigns.
5. Think holistically about placements
Where you place your ads is key to their success. For prospecting campaigns, placing ads alongside relevant content – like running shoes on a fitness website – can boost engagement. Retargeting campaigns can use broader placements since the audience already knows your brand, but they should still match your brand values and audience preferences. Regularly review placements for performance and brand safety, removing any that don’t meet your standards. Placement tips include:
- Use contextual targeting: Match your ads with relevant content to improve relevance and engagement. Obvious examples include advertising travel deals on travel blogs or skincare products on beauty sites.
- Use audience targeting: Combine placement with demographic and behavioural targeting to ensure your ads are seen by the right people in the right places.
- Monitor brand safety: Regularly audit your ad placements to exclude any sites or apps that could damage your brand’s reputation. Use tools like exclusion lists and, where appropriate, consider third-party verification services.
- Experiment with ad networks: Test placements across different ad networks (e.g., Google Display Network, Amazon DSP, or specialised niche networks) to identify where your ads perform best.
- Prioritise premium inventory: Consider higher-quality placements on premium sites or apps where your target audience spends time, even if they come at a higher cost.
- Explore programmatic direct: Partner with specific publishers directly for guaranteed placements on reputable sites, ensuring control over where your ads appear.
- Test placement formats: Evaluate performance across different placement types, such as above-the-fold versus below-the-fold ads, sidebar banners versus in-content ads, or mobile-first placements versus desktop.
- Balance reach and specificity: While broad placements can help with reach, don’t sacrifice relevance. Find a sweet spot where you’re reaching enough people without appearing in unrelated or ineffective contexts.
- Leverage geotargeting: For local or regional campaigns, ensure your ads are placed on sites and apps that are geographically relevant to your audience.
- Evaluate placements regularly: Use analytics to track the performance of individual placements, pausing or excluding low-performing or irrelevant ones to focus your budget on what works.
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Ready to make your display advertising work harder?
Oban’s Local In-Market Experts (LIMEs) can help your display campaigns connect with international audiences in a way that feels natural and relevant. With their understanding of local language and preferences, LIMEs ensure your ads make an impact across different markets. After all, what works in one country might fall flat in another. Get in touch to see how we can help your campaigns perform better – wherever your audience is.