Banner placements are too expensive! What can I do to improve my brand awareness online?

Media buying can be an expensive business, especially when you’re going through an agency. Frankly, it’s not an area that I have specialised in in the past, mainly because banner Ad’s are notoriously bad for online sales. But it’s one that’s become more accessible to all of us recently due to Google’s acquisition of doubleclick.

In your Google Ad Words account you may (or may not) have noticed various options for when you create a new creative or Ad.

Most of the time you probably just want to create a standard text Google Ad.

But try exploring the ‘Image Ad’ option if you’re interested in increasing brand awareness and you never know, you might even get a sale or two (as some of our clients unexpectedly have!).

One of the reasons that Google Image Ad’s are so powerful is the ability to contextualise your placements. What this means is you can create a keyword list alongside your Image Ad so that it’ll only display when certain words or key-phrases are used on a page.

I saw this in action recently when I was reading an article about zoo animals being inadvertently sold to a hunting group. Sitting beside the article was an Image Ad (or banner) for an animal welfare agency.

Very clever.

Another powerful feature is the ability to select the websites you’d like your Image Ad’s to appear on, and because Google has become such a colossus, the list is breathtaking.

First you simply use Google’s placement tool to select where you’d like your Image Ad’s to appear on.

Then you select from the list of websites which have Google’s Partnerships.

Here’s an example of some local newspapers and the possible impressions your Image Ad might receive each day if you add them to your list:

There are two ways you can bid to make your Image Ad appear on partner sites, CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per 1,000 Impressions). From our experience, it’s better to pick CPC, even though the bid amounts need to be quite high, (say around $1.50 to $3.00 per click) in order for your Ads to appear.

The reason is that you get unlimited impressions and given that your CTR (Click Through Rate) is quite low, you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg branding your business or product.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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