With such a huge impact on the revenue of a news giant like NYTimes, it’d be interesting to see see exactly how people really feel about online advertising.  Check out our infographic below for a visual guide on some of the latest data in the online advertising industry:

Online Advertising and How People Feel About It

	Patience: Patience is a virtue, so they say – and that applies to reaping the benefits of a good marketing crop as well. Building brand awareness takes time. With time comes the ability to recall and recognize a brand because brand exposure leads to brand awareness. Creating a banner ad that’s effective, such as Tungle.me’s, is important in reminding users to return, keeping the brand at the top of people’s mind. Seeing Tungle.me’s logo, with its clock-like image, reminds me that time-is-ticking—I have meetings that need to be scheduled and Tungle.me can help keep me up-to-date and organized.
	Message: Brand awareness makes it so that customers differentiate your brand from other competitors and remember the product and return to your site. Displaying a short, crisp, and clear message is crucial in marketing your product as it will effectively get the brand across to your audience. The banner ad’s short message “Scheduling Made Easy” reminds one of the ease of setting up an account and managing their schedule. As a member, this is a great subtle reminder of how Tungle.me syncs with my calendar to make scheduling meetings, appointments, calls, and more, easy.
	Call to Action: As discussed in the previous months’ blogs, having a call to action button is a must have in any banner creation. Tungle.me displays a strong “Learn More” call to action at the bottom of the banner. The button, in solid green, contrasts against the purple background, both non-neutral colors, calling attention to the button and enticing the audience to click and soon be on their way towards discovering the ease of scheduling.

A company’s brand serves as a psychological tool that makes its product memorable. A child who sees a splash of orange paint will instantly think ‘Nickelodeon,’ while a silver three-pointed star let’s adults know that they just saw an ad for Mercedes-Benz. But companies like Nickelodeon and Mercedes have been around for decades! How’s an SMB supposed to compete against brands that millions of people notice every day?

Simple – by connecting with its engaged audience!

Social Media:

Social media is a great way to engage with your audience at a low cost. Though there’s one caveat: don’t jump on a social media tactic without having a good strategy. If your audience is more active on Twitter than Facebook, then it doesn’t make sense to do a huge social promotion on Facebook. Also, make sure that all content that you post or tweet is legitimately helpful to your audience – offer deals, strategic advice, and industry insight.

Ad-Targeting:

Big brands are memorable because they advertise everywhere, and spend a lot of money doing so. Adidas pays top dollar to shower YouTube visitors with their impressions. SMBs however don’t have a big enough budget to advertise this way. With ReTargeting, SMBs can show their ads on sites like YouTube for a price point that’s within their budget. This is because ReTargeting only shows ads to the specific users who have visited the SMB’s site, and not to the millions of other people who visit YouTube and wouldn’t even care about the SMB’s brand yet.

Evangelize:

It’s been said that ‘the best products turn users into evangelists.’ Nike puts their swoosh on all of their products, while HootSuite’s owl can be seen on every Facebook post made through that client. Your clients use your product for a reason, so there’s no reason that they wouldn’t want to recommend it to other people who they know would benefit from it. Offering promotions that encourage your clients to evangelize your product is a great way to spread your brand to the right people.

For any company that’s ready to grow, brand scaling is a challenge that can be overcome on a tight budget. Check out our case study on Crowdcast’s use of ReTargeting to overcome this challenge.

When using ReTargeter, having a strong Return On Investment (ROI) is crucial in determining how your company moves forward with its marketing strategies. This month’s winner has been chosen based on this metric. The winner for the best ReTargeting banner ad for the month of May is Zendesk.

So why has Zendesk’s banner ad produced such a high ROI?

• Image: Who wouldn’t love Zendesk’s Buddha-like character – overweight and half-naked, and smiling so big, you can’t help but be reassured that everything’s going to be okay. Equipped with a wireless headset, he looks ready, willing, and more than happy to support customers.
• Background Color: The background shade of olive green exhibits a playfulness and sense of lightheartedness that fits Zendesk’s aura. It’s a company that believes help desk support doesn’t have to be complicated and the use of vibrant colors are in line with this message. The bold green color also allows the white of the font to not fade into the background and the plainness of the text lets you know that Zendesk is all about simplicity. The company name, logo, and catchphrase are clear and easy to see. The sunlight behind the meditating character brings light to the background color as well.
• Catchy Phrase: Sometimes customer support equals questions, complaints and stress. According to this ad campaign, nope, not with Zendesk . “Painless Customer Support?” Yes, please! The Call to Action button, “Instant Karma – Try Now,” emphasizes the theme and adds to the peace you’ll experience by using Zendesk. This ad makes me want to start on the journey to customer support enlightenment…

Stay tuned for next month’s best ReTargeting banner ad of the month!

• Increase your brand awareness
• Retain your website’s visitors
• Drive users throughout your conversion funnel

The key beauty to this technology is that it really is only serving banner ads to people who have shown at least some amount of engagement in your brand.  This makes ReTargeting a smarter spend than most other display ad campaigns as it focuses on your brand’s engaged userbase.  Even if other campaigns are demographically targeted, your brand’s ads will be much more memorable to your users if they are being ReTargeted.

A few concerns can arise, however, when your banner ads start following your site’s visitors.

• How do ReTargeted campaigns know who your visitors are?
• Will the ads overbear your users?

The absolute truth is that there is NEVER any transfer of personally identifiable data.  ReTargeting works by having you place one line of code on your site.  When a user visits your site, this single line of code drops a cookie onto the user’s computer, which starts the ReTargeting process and has your ads follow your visitors around the web.  Additionally, companies like ReTargeter follow best practices to make sure that your users never get inundated with your banner ads.

Some high-level ways to utilize this technology:

• In conjunction with any outbound email marketing that you may do, ReTargeting campaigns can place cookies on any user who opens your emails, effectively beginning the ReTargeting process for them.
• Additionally, there is a huge value in utilizing ReTargeting to encourage your users to convert throughout your freemium product’s funnel by displaying banners with different CTAs to people who have converted throughout different stages of your funnel.
• Lastly, you can target the people who have visited a specific product’s page on your site, and target them with ads to encourage them to learn more and purchase your product.  This is great for any company that sees a high amount of shopping cart abandonment for any of their particular products.

The value of advertising to your users via ReTargeting is definitely huge for building brand awareness, retaining visitors, battling shopping cart abandonment, and driving users throughout your conversion funnel.  With all of these benefits being set from ReTargeting, you can be sure that this form of hypertargeting  will deliver a tremendous ROI.

With more than 100 clients and thousands of banner ads, it becomes easier to set apart good banners from mediocre ones. In order to define a “good” banner, I’ve measured banners with an above average Click Through Rate (CTR) and determined which are the most effective, based on their performance all the way down to conversion. Given this analysis, Dollar Days’ banner ad stands out as the best ReTargeting ad for April. So what exactly sets this banner ad apart from others, you ask?

• Appeal – The ad only has a few images, but against the white background, the pictures pop. The company’s logo is appealing itself: the sun, so cool despite being so hot, that it has to put shades on! Likewise, the dollar sign for the “s” is appropriate for what Dollar Days is advertising: Saving “$,” which is clearly conveyed by the images in the middle.
• Clear Call to Action Button – Call to Action is key in receiving a high CTR! Call to action buttons make consumers more inclined to actually click on the banner when they see an impression. Looking at this ad and seeing the “start saving” button (with the arrow - a surprising key competent) makes me want to scroll over and click, so I can get started on saving money right away.
• Concise Message – Many people fail to realize that simplicity in displaying a clear, straight forward message is more than enough to create an effective banner ad. The banner ad was designed in a way that visibly represents the company and what is being advertised. The company’s name is in plain view at the top of the screen with minimal text at the bottom, yet the message is still communicated.

Stay tuned for next month’s Best ReTargeting banner ad! =)

With a freemium model, one of our clients utilized the power of ReTargeting to drive conversions over a month long cycle of ReTargeting. Being confident in its conversion funnels, our client focused 75% of its budget on driving traffic to an optimized landing page in hopes of getting users to give them a try. Since these users were people who previously checked out our client’s site, they’ve already had some interest in the product, and were very prone to trying out the free trial. Taking it a step forward, our client ran the rest of their ReTargeting budget toward bringing their free trial users to an optimized landing page, hoping that these engaged users loved the product so much that they’d actually pay for it.

So how did this campaign perform?  Beautifully.  To give you an example of the ROI, just last week:

• We captured 44 email leads who signed up for the free trial, at a value of $7.16/lead
• We drove 7 sales that week which added up to a 134% immediate ROI (not counting the email leads above)
• Because the product is freemium with an ongoing subscription, the ROI scales linearly in the long term

The power of ReTargeting with an optimized conversion funnel can deliver huge benefits to any SMB with a freemium model. But what’s so special about this combination? How can these 2 things alone deliver such a huge ROI? Consider this:

• If more people start using the free side of a freemium product, then there will be more people who will potentially convert to the premium side of the product
• ReTargeting brings people interested in both sides of the freemium product back to their appropriate landing page
• Optimized conversion funnels will increase your number of conversions on both sides of the freemium product

Using ReTargeting to feed retained users throughout your funnels increases sales in the short term. Keeping these users subscribed to your premium product, while continually adding more conversions every month, will have a tremendous impact on your ROI in the long term.

1) Load all of your company’s email contacts into Flowtown.
2) Create an email campaign only to those people in your list who are on Facebook. Yes, Flowtown allows you do this. Amazing.
3) Before you hit send, sign up for Fan ReTargeting.
4) Take the code from Fan ReTargeting and place it into the footer of your HTML Flowtown email.
5) Now when you send out that blast, not only are folks going to potentially become a fan through the message in your email but they will also be tagged for Fan ReTargeting.
6) The folks who open the email (and only those folks) will see ads encouraging them to become fans of your brand.
7) Increase your fan count dramatically!

Look for more in the Marketing 2.0 series from ReTargeter in the coming weeks.

Obviously, the beauty of online marketing is that you can track metrics, and this metric data can go a long way. Using:

· Landing pages

· Tracked links

· Funnel tracking tools

you can find out the conversion rate of each of your marketing channels. Channels can be anything from your ReTargeter campaign, to links on your social media profiles (we tracked a conversion last week that actually came from LinkedIn).

The best way to start doing this is by creating a landing page for each of your campaigns (see Unbounce – a great tool for A/B testing landing pages). This will help you optimize your conversion funnel for each of your marketing channels. You should also track each and every link you’ve put out on the web that leads to any page on your domain (see tracking for retargeting). This allows you to view which medium was used to access each of your landing pages. Lastly, you should track each step of your conversion funnel (some good tools for this are MixPanel and KISSMetrics). Most importantly, this shows you exactly how many people from each of your marketing channels actually converted, but it can also show you the pages that people from each of your channels are viewing.

Some conversion sources, however, can’t be tracked on your own end. ReTargeter offers the additional metric of view-through conversion tracking (see view-through conversion tracking for retargeting). This metric shows conversions that people made after seeing an impression, but then proceeded to type your website into the address bar a few minutes later. This can prove to be very valuable, as one of our clients has seen 20 view through conversions for every 3 click through conversions, and another has shown 3 click-through conversions for every 39 view-through conversions!

Tracking conversion data is clutch in justifying your spend on advertising. Optimizing your landing pages and conversion funnels, tracking all of your links, and using funnel tracking tools, are great ways to enhance your conversion tracking data. Additionally, utilizing ReTargeter’s view-through conversion data gives you additional data to help you understand your spend.

So, in celebration of the release of yet ANOTHER product that ReTargeter solution works on, we’re giving one away for free! There are two ways to win:

1.) All you need to do is retweet the following:

ReTweet this and win #ReTargeter ’s iPad http://bit.ly/ReTiPad via @retargeter

OR

2.) Come up with a creative tweet using the #retargeter hash-tag

We will pick a winner from the pool of retweets and creative tweets at ad:tech San Francisco on April 21, 2010. We will notify the winner via direct message, so please follow us!

Good luck, and happy ReTweeting.