One of the more prominent advertising options that Google offers to its marketing customers is display advertising. The company has, for some time now, been leading the way in successful display advertising, and most marketers get the performance that they are looking for out of these display ads. Now, Google has decided to take their display offerings a step further, by releasing a new format for display ads. In a blog post today, Google announced this new display ad option and they also wrote a bit about engagement in advertising and helping brands see their fullest potential on the web. It is a pretty stacked post, so I will give you some of the major points, here.
Google’s new display advertising format is one that already exists, but the idea is new to the company. These ads are in a lightbox format, allowing for marketers to pay only upon engagement from a user. However, these lightbox ads have some pretty unique features, as were described in the blog;
The lightbox starts as a standard display ad, making it scalable, but after a two-second hover, expands to a super-sized canvas. In internal tests, we’ve seen that this smart hover feature eliminates nearly 100% of accidental expansions and increases engagement by 6-8X over standard click-to-expand ads. The result: users only engage with the ads they really want to see and brand marketers only pay for truly engaged views.
Another thing that Google has announced today was their recent findings from a study conducted recently. Apparently, upon looking at the impact during as well as two weeks after 92 ad campaigns, Google found out that their ads on YouTube, such as the TrueView video ads, as well as ads from their Google Display Network were seeing substantial results. On average, every $1 spend on YouTube ads returned $1.70 in sales. This was 2.4x more efficient than the television spend for these campaigns.
These ads also help achieve branding goals: we found, on average, that ads on YouTube and the Google Display Network drive a 36% increase in visits to your website and a 36% increase in searches for your brand online (Google Internal Data, 2012)
Speaking of brands, Google continued to speak about what they have been doing to help brands grasp the full potential of their advertising efforts. Not only has the company been helping brands, they have actually created a real, physical space for brands and Google to meet face-to-face to discuss everything and anything marketing. The new “BrandLab,” is located at Google’s YouTube headquarters, where they have already had quite a few well-known brands as visitors.
In one post, we have pretty much been let into the world of Google, as far as what they have been up to for the past months. With all these new options and all this new information that Google has released for advertisers and marketers, they will have opened up quite a bit of intrigue in their company’s advertising business. As if Google’s Display Network was not helpful enough, it has improved even more.
