Your deep down the path of a display based campaign. Considerations have been made for imagery and messaging and you’re learning more about Beautiful and Effective Display Ads. In these considerations, have you thought on where your ads will be showing up?
Here are a few things to keep in mind when considering the look of your ad in relation to where the ad will be displayed.
While we have a little bit of control about where our ads appear on the Google Display Network, we have complete control if we are designing ads for media buys or social media platforms. What should your ad look like if it sits on Search Engine Watch? How about LinkedIn or Facebook. If you don’t put any consideration into the difference you could be making a huge mistake.
Take a look at a screen shot from the Search Engine Watch website. Does the ad in the screen shot pop out and hit you in the face like an obnoxious KGB joke? I don’t believe it does. The ad fits the color scheme and look of the overall Search Engine Watch website.
Some will argue that if it doesn’t pop out people aren’t going to see it. My rebuttal is, do you really want to be the kid that has to scream and beg for attention in order for people to look at him? Be seamless and smooth. People who are browsing content of a website will appreciate the seamless aesthetic.
Once you know where your ad will be showing up, it’s time to strategize how you will stand out. Lets say you are putting together a campaign for LinkedIn. Article after article has taught you that using faces of people will help your ad stand out and build greater trust.
In almost all cases this is true and a good thing. However what happens if we used a person’s face on LinkedIn for our ad? It just so happens that the image size for ads on LinkedIn are pretty close to the same size has the profile picture boxes.
Why does this matter? Because the ads will be appearing right next to profile pictures of “People You May Know”. If you stick a picture of someones face in your ad, your ad will just appear to be another person on the page within the LinkedIn network.
The “People You May Know” sits right on top of the advertising space. Its good to blend into the color scheme of the website, but you don’t want your ads to blend in SO much that it isn’t even recognizable. Wasted time and resources!
The ads that appeared on my LinkedIn homepage today knew where they were going to be placed (as seen above). They all went with icons or graphics of some sort for their image instead of a human face. This hasn’t always been the case, I see it all the time where the pictures used in the advertisements are blending in with bad images (in fact, when I refreshed my LinkedIn page there were two of these bad examples).
You can try it out. Open up your LinkedIn homepage and take a peak at the images being used in the advertisements. Do they stand out? Do they blend in? How many of you see people advertising with pictures of peoples faces?
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