That said, diving into the deep-end of the digital advertising pool is a daunting thought, especially after reading the results of the State of Inbound survey. How can you make your advertising as relevant and as non-intrusive as possible for your potential clients? What is the right way to advertise and the wrong way to advertise? How can you avoid making mistakes that may scare customers away? To help ease your fears, we’ve debunked a few common digital advertising myths — so you can dip your toe in the pool instead of diving in headfirst.
Myth #1: Nobody Clicks on Ads
Truthfully, about 70% of U.S internet users ignore online banner ads, but this stat has only helped to push the digital advertising industry to make some important changes. Improvements to online bidding tools and the emergence of less intrusive ads are helping marketers to re-design better ads and use more relevant keywords.
For example, in-feed social ads are now considered one of the most successful new ways to advertise online, and are generating high click-thru rates as a result.
Myth #2: The Only Way to Advertise is through Search
The rise of YouTube and other social video platforms has helped online video formats to emerge as a leading way to advertise.
For example, any video uploaded to YouTube can have the potential to be an ad. Video ads appear before other videos on YouTube, beside playing videos, and also in search results. YouTube has a variety of targeting options that help you reach the right customer for your business. You can target by age, gender, location, interests and more. Plus, you only pay when someone engages with your ad. If they skip it before 30 seconds (or the end) you don’t pay a cent.
Non-mobile Digital video advertising accounted for $4 billion dollars in 2015, up over 30% from the year prior.
Myth #3: Don’t Run PPC Ads Until Your Website is Perfect
If you are in the process of updating or re-desiging your website, you can still direct traffic to it via PPC ads. However, instead of sending traffic to your homepage or another page that’s “under construction”, make sure all ads are directed to well-designed and highly efficient landing pages and lead generation forms. In other words: your website doesn’t need to be perfect, but your landing pages should be!
Myth 4: Only Measure Results by Clicks
Besides overall clicks, there are a ton of other metrics that you can measure to gauge the success of your PPC campaigns. For example, every campaign should be set up to measure conversion tracking, which measures specific actions like a purchase or lead submission from within your ad platform, using a code snippet.
Traffic metrics such as impressions, clicks and cost-per-click will help you understand the success of your ad keywords and how users are responding to your ads, whereas conversion metrics will tell you how well your landing pages and forms are working, how much every lead is costing you, and how much additional revenue you are earning as a result of your ads.
Myth #5: Offline Doesn’t Matter
Digital advertising is a big deal…but it isn’t the only deal. There are still many cost-effective and relevant ways to advertise offline, like TV, radio, magazine or paper print, or even mailed coupons or flyers. Digital advertising may not be the be-all, end-all solution for every business, so before you decide to put all of your eggs in the digital advertising strategy basket, make sure you really understand what offline methods have been successful for you in the past and may continue to be in the future — and use that informaiton to create an integrated, holistic strategy that can encompass both an online and offline advertising presence.
Summary
Digital advertising is definitely the way of the future (and really, the “present” as well), but it will only work for your business if it’s what makes the most sense for your brand, and if it’s executed properly. Stay on top of your analytics reporting so that you can see right away what is working and what is not working, and make adjustments to your strategy as you go.
