Display Extension helps you tie together search and display campaigns­

When I used to work at an agency, we would try to convince brands to bring all their marketing business—search, display, whatever—to us. A one stop shop equals efficiency and, more importantly, integrated planning, right? But integrated planning only works if you’re really coordinating all of your campaigns.

Back then, planning meant meeting every month to re-allocate budget to the tactic that needed it.
“So the search team needs more money to maintain top positions? Let’s move $150k from the display budget to search, then.” It didn’t mean we could measure how, for instance, the display advertising we bought on Yahoo! influenced the search advertising we bought elsewhere so that we could maximize cross-channel impact. The tools to track marketing across multiple tactics just weren’t there.

We needed something like Display Extension, which Yahoo! just announced—a way to not only track search and display campaigns together, but even show display ads to search users.

Making search and display work together
There are good reasons to coordinate your search and display efforts. According to a 2008 Specific Media study, people who saw a display ad for a product or brand were 155% more likely to search for that product than those who didn’t.

Display Extension allows an agency to truly capture the synergies between digital tactics. The solution not only tackles the cross-channel attribution question via Assist Reporting, but also makes those insights actionable with Search Retargeting. And for search agencies who want to move into display, we provide the technology and the display creative/media guidance to help make it happen.

Here are more specifics on what Display Extension includes:

Assist Reporting: Understand the value of the final conversion and its influencing actions across all your digital channels. That display ad you bought may not have converted well on its own, but it might have contributed to conversions driven by other ads (perhaps a brand term you bought on Yahoo!).

Search Retargeting: Directly tie your search and display marketing by understanding which users responded to your search ads and re-messaging them with a display ad on the Right Media Exchange.

Creative Services: Get guidance on creative best practices and how to manage your in-house creative team.

Media Solutions and Consultation: Take your Display Extension solution to market with help in packaging search and display together, optimizing ads and developing messaging for clients.

Publishers can also get value out of Display Extension, whether they need an immediately measurable branding metric like Assists to unlock the value of their display views, or whether they want to provide more agency-like services with creative and media solutions.

Whatever your advertising model, you can work to understand it better to drive the best performance from your entire digital portfolio, reach users that have demonstrated strong intent in search with relevant display advertising across the Right Media Exchange, and help increase revenue through a measurable multi-channel solution. Visit our Professional Services website to get started.

—Shoen Yang, Agency Professional Services

A few years ago, I was talking to a junior account executive on a southern California publisher sales force about pitching a cost-per-acquisition buy to one her clients who was already paying for impressions. Her immediate reaction was “No way, my advertiser is like, totally overpaying for this placement and I don’t want them to find out.”

I explained that if she worked with advertisers to get a higher conversion rate, she could actually get a higher eCPM than she was already getting. She looked at me as if I were an alien.

Later, we got on a call with a direct response advertiser, who stated that he would actually pay out a higher effective CPM on that placement if they could start buying on a CPA, because they would be getting the impressions that backed out for them, and they could spend more at a higher rate. I wanted to give him a big fat kiss. I could see realization dawning on the account executive’s face.  By working together with the advertiser, her inventory could provide the best value for them and they will re-invest more and at higher rates as a result.

Why performance advertising
I still hear the same questions that the junior account executive was asking: why should I sell performance and how do I sell performance? More specifically, how can I sell performance to brand advertisers?

The first thing to know is that performance advertising works and pays out. Publishers often tell us that it doesn’t and there’s no point in selling it—they don’t perform, advertisers don’t renew, it’s a lost cause. Performance dollars are growing—performance-based pricing grew by 11.8% in 2007, says the 2008 IAB Internet Advertising report—and that’s a lot of budget to walk away from. As a publisher, you have to make it work.

The beauty of performance ad products is that it’s not guaranteed—publishers can offer performance products without creating channel conflict, by offering it on non-guaranteed/unsold inventory.  It’s hard to dispute that the inventory is valuable and performs—in fact, this inventory is often monetized by ad networks, who consequently run performance buys against it.

Five steps to sell performance inventory
During a performance sales training at a large international publisher using Right Media, I was told that a top network in their market was selling their inventory on a performance basis and stealing their advertisers. The irony was that this network, and many similar networks, was using the same platform this publisher was using to optimize the inventory.

Publishers need to enable their sales force and ops teams to capture that performance and direct response budgets. Here are a few basic steps:

1. Stop guaranteeing delivery and performance. While they’re not mutually exclusive, if you don’t knowing how your inventory performs, you may set up the wrong expectations with your advertisers.
2. Negotiate for a test with new advertisers and campaigns, with minimum yield levels, timing requirements, creatives and placements. That way you both know in advance how your inventory performs with their campaigns.
3. Qualify campaigns based on campaign goals, creative quality, conversion path, consideration cycle, and success metrics.
4. Sell performance products but optimize on the backend to get performance and delivery—work with the advertiser to develop creatives, pricing types, adjustments
5. Adopt tools and best practices for optimization. Optimization is a balance between art and science—without the right tools, it’s a little too much Van Gogh.

Not sure where to start? If you need a little help, our Performance Sales Enablement professional service can give you some guidance.

Offline dollars are moving online, brand dollars are moving to brand performance, and advertisers are getting tighter on seeing performance results.  Advertisers care about their brand and always will, but they also care about results too. It’s time to offer products that advertisers want, and get disciplined about selling and optimizing them.

—Jeanne Hwang, Director of Consulting