In the previous module, you learnt about Search Engine Marketing. It is now time to move on to the next
module: Display Advertising.

So, welcome to this module of the program. Let me quickly walk you through the broad structure and the
learning objectives of this module.

It consists of four main parts —

1. Introduction to display advertising
2. Ad networks and its types
3. Ad exchange and programmatic ad buying

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 4. Future of display advertising

So, to know display advertising in depth, we will first learn about

(i) display ads and the various
(ii) stakeholders like advertisers and publishers who are involved in the eco-system.

After that, you will learn about the

(ii) consumer funnel and map the usage of display advertising along the funnel.

Next, you will learn how display ads work, right from a.
picking an ad format and
b. creating one, say a text ad or an image, to deciding where your ads will run based on your c.
target audience, and finally ending with
d. the advertiser paying the publisher for the ad space.

Finally, we will discuss about the various ad formats like banner, text, interactive videos, and so on.

In the second session, we will start by learning about

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(i) ad networks which aggregates ad spaces from publishers and sells them to various advertisers on
demand.

Advertisers can buy these ads as per different

(ii) Pricing mechanisms such as
a. Cost per Click,
b. Cost per Lead, and
c. Cost per Impression.

Then you will learn how ad networks function, starting from setting one up and ending with targeting. And
finally, within this, we will also learn about the concept of affiliate network and what are the deal
structures involved there.

The next session is all about ad exchanges. An ad-exchange is an online exchange interface, which
aggregates ad spaces from publishers and sells them to advertisers who buy them through an auction
process.
You will also learn about the
(ii) Programmatic ad buying process on the basis of which an ad exchange operates.

Then, we will look into the two most prevalent platforms used in display advertising - Google Display
Network and Facebook.

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The final session is about the future of display advertising. Here, you will start by understanding the
consequences of

(i) Excessive display advertising on your consumers, which is popularly known as banner blindness.

Then, you will look into the concepts of intelligent and data-driven display campaigns, where you will come
across
(iii) Automated targeting based on the user’s location, context and intend.

At the end of the module, as a part of the live project, you will get to run a real-time display campaign on
Google AdWords under a given budget and deadline.

Further information on this will be provided in the module. So, what are we waiting for? Let’s start right
away with the first session of the module.

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Hi, if you’ve spent any amount of time on the internet without an ad blocker, you have probably been
bombarded by ads. Ads on top of websites, ads before videos on YouTube, ads on apps. They’re
everywhere!

Ever wondered where these are coming from? Why are you seeing these ads at all? Well, ads may be
annoying sometimes, but they are quite often the primary source of income for many content creators
around the world.

App developers make money from the ads that are shown on their apps. YouTube channels make money
when ads are shown before their videos, and lots of writers make money from ads hosted on their blogs.
In this module, we’ll look at display ads from a marketer’s point of view. We’ll learn how these ads are tied
to the different stages of the consumer funnel and some special types of display ads.

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Display advertising is analogous to print ads you have seen all your life. If you open a newspaper like Times
of India, Hindustan Times, Dainik Jagran etc., you will see that besides carrying news, they also carry
advertisements.

These ads are published by newspapers because an advertiser has paid the newspaper to book space in the
newspaper’s pages. Similarly, a lot of online entities i.e. websites and apps also carry ads, other than their
regular content.​ ​These ads which are shown on all online entities are known as display ads.

For example, if you look at​ ​the NDTV website, you might come across an Airtel ad like this​ ​or you might as
well see Flipkart advertising on a game app, with ads embedded within the game as the user plays it.​ ​So,
what is the potential impact of all these display ads? They lead to an
1. increase in the purchase intent,
2. higher brand recall 3.​ ​Increase in viewership.

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In the most basic state, the display ad ecosystem has two players – Publishers and Advertisers. A publisher
is one who sells space where ads can be shown.

An advertiser pays money to this publisher to buy space. Sticking to our analogy of newspapers, if a
company like Grofers wants an ad on the front page of Times of India it would have to pay an amount that
the Times of India has fixed for the front page.

Thus, Grofers is the advertiser while Times of India is the publisher. Next, if you recall the Flipkart example,
where Flipkart was advertising on a gaming app, Flipkart is an advertiser who is paying the gaming app and
the gaming app who a publisher is selling ad space to Flipkart.

This brings us to the end of the first segment, where you learnt about the concept of display ads and the
players involved in the ecosystem of display advertising. But you must be wondering, why are advertisers
paying money to publishers? What are they getting out of it? Let’s learn more about it in the next segment.

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A consumer goes through multiple stages of awareness, consideration and purchase before finally buying
the product or service. So, it becomes critical for a marketer to understand the importance of display ads at
each of these stages. The content that you communicate through ads pushes the user to take the next step
forward. Let’s learn more about all of these in detail.

A user goes through the stages of awareness, consideration and decision before making a purchase. In this
session, we’ll learn how display ads play a key role at each stage. We’ll also learn what kind of
communication to use at the different stages.
A customer usually goes through 3 stages before buying any product -
1. ​Awareness, ​2. ​Consideration and
3. ​Decision.
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Display ads can play a major role in each of these stages. Before a consumer makes his purchasing decision,
he or she must be Aware of the products available. Thus, one integral part of brand building is to create
awareness by informing your target audience about your existence.

With display ads you can reach out to new or existing consumers and strengthen your visibility and
awareness to improve brand connect. This can influence online as well as offline purchases.

Put yourself in the shoes of a buyer. You want to buy something online, say a phone, you would generally
feel comfortable in buying online from Amazon or Flipkart because you have seen them in TV ads, print ads
and obviously, display ads.

All of these have created a positive perception of the brands in your mind. On the other hand, you would
be hesitant to spend your money on a new ecommerce website that you haven’t seen before.

The second step of consumer journey is the Consideration stage. There are several products which are
purchased on the basis of their looks such as Smartphones, Clothing, Automobiles just to name a few.

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Having a variety of choices and communications at their disposal, consumers tend to fall back on the
limited set of brands that have already made an impression on their minds. Display ads can influence
consideration for these products. Again, if you were trying to buy a phone online, you know that you want
certain specifications and certain features. However, how a phone looks matters in the purchase decision.

So phone companies make ads with professionally shot and edited photos of the phone. These ads help
you imagine holding it in your hands and you start to consider buying the phone that looks best in your
hands.

The third and the final step of a consumer journey will be the Decision stage where a customer is
influenced by using display ads in a way that these help the advertiser in giving the final push to the
customer to buy his product.

As a buyer, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll buy on your first visit to the website. You would evaluate your
1. Options, research more, compare
2. Prices across stores etc. before you make the decision to buy.

These are special type of display ads that are geared towards getting a sale from users who would
otherwise have dropped out of the customer funnel or gone to a competitor.

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So, you learnt how these display ads influence the consumers at different stages of the consumer funnel.
How, through its communication, a display ad can increase user engagement and conversions, and keep
the consumers from switching to other websites or entirely logging out of the website. What you need to
be careful about is targeting the right set of customers at each stage.

So, having understood the importance of display ads across the consumer funnel, it is time for you to get
into the nitty gritty of the display ads framework. There is a cycle of steps involved for an advertiser to
display ads to its consumers. Let’s delve deep into this.

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So, before you actually get into creating a display ad campaign on multiple softwares, you should know the
entire journey of how a display ad framework works end to end, with the help of Google AdWords.

The first thing that you do in the process of going ahead is by -

a.​ ​Picking a format

● ​Now, ads could be in multiple formats. It could either be a simple text ad or a rich-media, or an
interactive ad which is filled with images.

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 b. Do the targeting
● Display ads give you the leverage of creating targeted campaigns. You can target your potential
customers as per demographics, location, interests etc.

c. Create an ad
● Once you decide on the type of people you would want to target, the next thing you do is to create
an ad, which is about choosing how an ad would look like both on Google Search as well as other
partner sites across the web and mobile interface.

d. Set a budget
● At this stage, you need to take a call on how much money do you want to spend to reach your
target audience and achieve your subsequent goals.

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e. Advertiser pays
● Here, the advertiser pays to Google Adwords as per the arrangement - be it a daily budget or a
monthly budget.

f. Publisher earns
● Finally, the publisher earns the price at which he sold his ad inventory to the advertiser from Google.

So, this sums up the simple process of how display ads function. For example, if Airtel plans to put an ad on
NDTV.com website for increasing conversions. It would select an ad format of either a video or a text ad,
following which it would select the target audience on the basis of demographics, age, gender, interest etc.
Next, Airtel would see how exactly, the ad would look like on NDTV website. Finally, the budget would be
set and as per the same Airtel will end up paying to NDTV.

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You must have come across a lot of ads, in the form of videos, text, and so on. For instance, when you are
playing a game on mobile, and suddenly a video or a banner comes up on the screen asking you to
download that game. The moment you click it, you are taken to the advertiser’s website and post that the
user is engaged further. Hence, a knowledge of these ad formats will help you decide the most effective ad
format for your campaigns. Let’s know more on this –

There can be multiple ad formats in case of Display ads. Let’s look at each of them one by one.

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a. Banner - If we look at this screenshot, these ads either appear at the top or bottom of the page. Many a
times, we do see something like this where, they appear as a sidebar the right or left sidebar. Banner ads
can be of many types.

A few of the standard banners which are used in the industry today are leader board and skyscraper. The
primary purpose of banner advertising is to promote a brand and/or to get drive visitors from the
publisher’s website to go to the advertiser's website.

Next comes the text ads.

b. Text - These ads comprise only of text. It is just the size of the font and the presence of URL that
makes all the difference in terms of its appearance as compared to banner ad. Have a look at a few of
these examples like the Chicago Tribune, where you could see this text ad with the headline - “1 Tip to
loose belly fat” highlighted in the red border.

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Next, you see these ads displayed on the mobile screen as well.

c. Then, you have the Rich media - these are image and graphic heavy ads, which pushes the users to
interact with the ad and finally convert the user.

For example, if you this IMDB website screenshot, you get to see the ad with the headline “Boardwalk
Empire” rich media ad, where you have options of “PLAY NOW”, “WATCH TRAILER”, “BEHIND THE
SCENES”.

Another example for this type of ad could be an ad like this, where the image ad mentioned at the bottom
of the mobile screen leads you to a larger picture and ultimately you end up playing the game.

Now, depending on the way display ads are put up on the website, is what decides whether it is a native or
a non-native ad. Let’s talk more about it.

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There are 2 broad ways in which display ads appear
1. Native ads
2. Non-native ads

Native ads. The first type, a native ad is a form of content that has been

1. Placed to flow naturally with the original content of a publisher’s online property - a website or an app.
These are ads that
2. Do not divert a user’s attention away from a publisher’s content but blend in with the user’s normal
usage.
Such ads are popular on
3. Content publishing sites and on social media.

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Let us look at some examples to understand these better. In this screenshot of Buzzfeed, there are links to
articles. One of them is tagged “Partner” i.e. it is an ad. However it looks identical to other links on
Buzzfeed. This is an example of a native ad.

Similarly on Facebook, you may have seen “sponsored” posts in your feed. These look like any other post
except they carry a “Sponsored” tag in place of the time stamp. These are also a type of native ads. Thus,
native ads are those ads that are designed to blend in with the design of the publisher’s website.

2. Non-native ads
The second type of ads are non-native ads.

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These are the most common type of display ads. These ads appear separately from a publisher’s primary
content i.e. they are usually on the side or bottom of a web page or app screen, not interfering with the
main content.

These ads interrupt a user’s normal usage and try to redirect him to the advertiser’s landing page. These
may appear in the form of text, still image, moving image GIF or video. This is an example of a non-native
image ad by Microsoft on Huffington Post website.

So, let’s summarise what you learnt in this session - To start off, we discussed the two main forces of
display advertising:
● Publishers
● Advertisers

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1. The publisher sells space for ads to be displayed, and
2. The advertiser pays money to the publisher to buy the space. These two forces come together to display
the ads that you see in your daily life on the internet.

You then went on to learn how a marketer influences the buyer through display ads at each of the three
stages of the consumer funnel:
● Awareness
● Consideration and
● Decision

Then, through the example of Google Display Ads, you learnt how display ads actually work — starting from
a)​ ​Choosing the format of the ad
b) To the final payment made by the advertiser
c) To the publisher.

Finally, you also learnt about the different types of ad formats. For example, a)
Banner ads,
b) Text ads,
c) Rich media etc.

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And you also got to know about the two broad categorisations of Display ads on the basis of the way they
are showcased on the internet. To recall, these types are:

● Native ads, the ones that integrate seamlessly with the content and seem like a natural extension
of the content. They generally appear on content publishing sites such as Buzzfeed and on social
media, say, Facebook.

● the second type are the Non native ads, the ones that appear in the form of text, still image,
moving image GIF or video, and are not part of the website’s primary content. These ads usually
appear on the side or bottom of a web page or app screen. For instance, an image ad by Microsoft
on the Huffington Post website

With this you reached the end of the session. Now, when you open any website or app, and see some ad,
you will be able to answer these questions: Is it a banner ad, rich media ad, or a native or non-native ad? Is
it for awareness, consideration or decision?

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.

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