Today, we’re looking at how to build brand awareness with display advertising. This can be a very nuanced conversation and it is important your team is on the same page from the jump. Some decisions that need to be made from the start are, what campaign and ad types to use and what KPIs will be used to measure the success of a brand awareness campaign.
Here we are going to break down a few ways to set up and measure a brand awareness campaign.
Why Display Campaigns for Brand Awareness?
Using a display campaign alongside a search campaign is a great tactic for a brand awareness objective.
These two campaign types will work side by side to support one another. When solely using search campaigns you are only getting in front of people who are actively searching for your product or service.
However, when using display campaigns and curated audiences your ads will appear in front of potential customers who might not even know your product or service exists. Thus expanding your potential and actual reach exponentially.
Here is where your search ads come in handy to support your display ads.
A potential customer who viewed your display ad may click directly on your ad and be taken straight to your sight. Great!
However, they might not be ready to buy just yet. Then a few days, weeks, or even months later, when they are ready to buy or looking for more information, they can search for your company and be met with a search ad.
Perfect! The tag team ad types did their job. Now, your search ads may come into play much quicker.
Those who are distrusting of display ads may pop over and do a quick google search right away for your company. Again being met with your search ads. So don’t be surprised if you see an increase in your search campaign impression and make sure to budget accordingly to pick up the new traffic.
Measuring the Success of a Brand Awareness Campaign
Being on the same page regarding Key Performance Indicators is crucial for any campaign, especially for a brand awareness campaign.
That’s because usually, brand awareness campaigns aren’t using conversion rate or cost per conversion as their success metrics, instead oftentimes using impressions, clicks, and CPM.
This can be a tricky adjustment if your team isn’t used to using these KPIs.
If your goal is to see an increase in impressions and clicks for a brand awareness campaign there is also a good chance that conversion rates will go down and cost per conversion will go up, which can make people uneasy.
We get that.
Usually, you want a higher conversion rate and a lower cost per conversion, which is why your KPIs need to be straightened out ahead of time.
So, why is a display campaign with a brand awareness objective worth it?
Well, it’s true, display ads, unlike search ads, aren’t necessarily reaching people who are actively searching for your product or service thus your click-through rate and conversion rate are logically going to decrease.
That being said, brand awareness campaigns are all about the long term pay off. Display ads aren’t reaching people actively searching for your product or service, no, but hopefully when people are in need of your product or service your company will come to mind or at least be a recognizable name when they search.
Keep in mind this need could be in 2 weeks, 2 months or even 2 years. Therefore you want to increase your impressions and clicks so you are getting in front of as many new customers as possible.
This leads us to another good indicator of a successful brand awareness campaign.
Rather than zeroing in and looking at the impressions and clicks of one individual campaign try zooming out and looking at branded queries as a whole. This is relevant for both paid ads and organic searches. Are more people searching for your company name?
For example, when running a Brand Awareness Campaign for 10 weeks we saw an 88% increase in paid branded search term queries and a 110% increase in organic branded search queries.
We saw that our increase in branded awareness spend strongly correlated with the increase in branded search queries. This benefit would not have been something that was noticed if we isolated ourselves to only looking at the display ad metrics. Thus, once again it is important to take a step back and look at the whole picture when running a brand awareness campaign.
All companies and campaigns are different. Running ads and goals can be very nuanced. It is crucial to have the important conversations about ad types and KPIs right off the bat to ensure that your campaign runs smoothly towards your team’s goals.