Can Hyper Local Display Ads Drive Hyper Efficiency?

Display. The elephant in the room of any performance marketing meeting, the centrepiece of awkward discussion, the perceived underperformer.

It seems that no matter what vertical you’re operating in and no matter the budget, striking a consistently positive ROI / low CPL (on a last-click basis at least) seems impossible. There are days, weeks even where GDN activity seems to be paying off but more often than not, you’re left wondering if your banners are floating around somewhere in the Milky Way.

I have always said that if it were my business, I would happily spend between 2% and 5% (at least) of my biddable media budget on Display Network activity without expecting a strong or positive ROI on a last-click basis. This is because I am a firm believer that to support future brand health, you must be prepared to accept a “loss” driving brand awareness at the top of the funnel. I also know that to increase your remarketing opportunity you must first build your cookie pool and display, is a relatively cheap way to drive semi-interested users to your site.

Aside from this, there are many other benefits to running Display. Whilst our clients generally understand this, they are often under pressure to get a positive return on all media spend.

Recently, we leveraged a client’s field marketing activity and turned it to our advantage with incredible results. Whilst we had been driving goals for them at a CPL that they were happy with, they were as surprised as we were with the results from our latest campaign.

They held events around South West London, a firework display and an outdoor cinema and had photographers capture the events. These intimate and striking photographs later formed the basis of our display banners. Utilising some creative audience targeting and timing the launch of our campaigns just right, we were able to engage a highly relevant audience, local to the boroughs in which these events took place.

The campaigns were launched around Week 13. A 67% reduction in CPL and a huge 400% increase in goal volume were recorded post the launch of these new campaigns. Two of these goals were “valuation requests”. That means we were able to engage users enough to request a valuation of their home, having clicked through to our client’s site via our display banners! I think everyone was happy with that.

It just goes to show that strategic audience targeting, combined with highly emotive creatives can go a long way. Users who had never visited our site were driven from the top to the bottom of the funnel after a single click. During this period, our display campaigns were often driving goals at a lower CPL than our search activity focused on the same London post codes. Many of the campaigns we run are local campaigns, but I’ve never seen a payoff like this having implemented a hyper local strategy.

If you think you need a little MediaVision creativity to kick-start your display efforts, feel free to get in touch with one of the team here so that we can take a look. Don’t spend another second pondering the mysteries of the Google Display Network!