With the rise of business technology, traditional marketers now have many options to support their marketing campaigns.

Various digital advertising tools now offer highly targeted and massive reach capabilities. For example, Google’s Display Network can reach over 2 million websites to display your business’ advertisement.

Display advertising (including clickable ads that appear in website margins) has many advantages that can improve your business’ online presence by:

All you need to do is carry over your knowledge of your audience so you can determine where to reach them online.

Effective Targeting

With display advertising, there are four different ways to reach your unique audiences with your ads to increase your online visibility and brand awareness.

1. Remarketing

Also called “retargeting,” gives you the option to show your ads to people who previously visited your website, your mobile website in mobile apps, or who have interacted with your business, and then tailor your messages specifically for them. You now have access to people who are most likely to buy from you. AdWords remarketing drives your customers to your website and app when they’re most engaged.

2. Audience targeting

Allows you to reach people based on their interests in products and services similar to your company, even when they visit pages or use apps unrelated to your business. You can select to have your ads shown to customers with an interest in certain categories or have ads featured on relevant sites. You also have the option to use ad groups, depending on your advertising goals.

3. Demographic targeting

Allows you to select audiences associated with particular demographic categories, like gender or age range. You can also exclude certain demographic categories to prevent them from seeing your ads.

4. Customer Match

Allows you to choose where to show ads to customers on Search, YouTube, and Gmail using data about those customers that you share with Google.

5. Brand awareness

In order to properly utilize display advertising, you need to understand its purpose. In short, display ads are great for driving brand awareness because, generally, these types of ads are found in a place a potential customer may be found.

For example, if a customer is on a website for vegetarian recipes, a display ad that may show up would be an advertisement for a health food store. The customer may not be aware of this type of store, but the ad would drive awareness. Marketers generally gather this information by studying customer behaviors, demographics, and previous search histories.

6. High volume

Display ads may promote your brand to the right people, but they also have high visibility. When you use display ads, they’re also being shown to customers who may not have thought to look for your products or services (even if they’re not part of your demographic).

Even if you’re not targeting an audience, they’ll still see your business in front of them.

Type of services or products

Certain ads may not bring you the highest ROI right away depending on the type of product or service you’re offering.

For example, services like towing, locksmiths, and doctors (also known as “urgent” services) are all services that users will specifically look for, and need, quickly. Using a display ad to advertise may not be the most beneficial if your service is something potential customers may need immediately.

However, this doesn’t mean your services wouldn’t benefit from a display ad—it just won’t be as beneficial to the customer in their time of need.

Mobile first

Did you know that almost 60% of searches are done on a mobile device? Typically, search ad campaigns are better equipped at handling mobile searches.

For example, a user may search for a service on their mobile device, which means they won’t be scrolling through a website. They’ll choose the first ad that comes up, and that’s generally going to be a PPC ad.