Open a display ad from a credit card company, a financial newspaper, a magazine subscription service, and a smart-home gadget startup, and you’ll notice something odd: they’re all speaking the same language. Not the same product, not the same audience, not even the same price point — but the same four words, somewhere in the headline: limited time only. A creative-text search across Adbeat’s index for the phrase “limited time” turns up this pattern at scale. Capital One uses...
Fanatical, a PC game key retailer, spent an estimated $102 million on display advertising over the last twelve months across the markets Adbeat tracks. It did that with 254 creatives — but the top-spending one, a 320×100 banner, carries five words of copy: the brand name, “SAVE BIG,” and “SHOP NOW.” That single unit absorbed an estimated $15.9 million. Meanwhile, Adobe ran 2,117 separate creatives containing the words “learn more,” and American Express ran 1,478. Between them, they put...
Creating a successful campaign on Google Display can be tricky. Just ask my friend Bob. Note: Urban Dictionary defines “my friend” as ‘a phrase that people use when they are too embarrassed to admit they are talking about themselves’. I assure you, that’s not the case here. [Image source: wikipedia.org] Bob works at an ecommerce store that sells construction equipment and was tasked with creating a campaign for generating leads. For his first campaign Bob had a budget of...
The least effective way to A/B test ad creatives — and how most people do it — is by guessing. They change a color here, switch a picture there, try out a new tagline… but it’s all done randomly and with little direction. The better way to test is to see what your competitors and other large advertisers are doing. What colors, layouts, elements and copy are they testing? Which ads have been seen more often? Which ads have they stopped running due...
There’s one HUGE mistake many marketers make when creating the ad copy and landing pages they’re sending traffic to. The problem is they present the same message to everyone. They use the same copy that works on their email list — people who are familiar with them and their product — as they use on their cold traffic landing pages and display ads — people who are NOT familiar with their company or product. Someone on your email list...
