What is Dynamic Digital Advertising?

Make your digital advertising work harder for you.

I’ve touched on the possibilities of using dynamic data within digital advertising in previous posts, but today I want to go into more depth on the subject.

The power of dynamic advertising is immense, and something I feel isn’t being utilised to it’s fullest extent in the current Irish market.

Dynamic advertising essentially means you tailor the content of your advertising to suit a specific set of criteria, so with just 1 creative you can display a wide range of content targeted to a user based on their browsing history, location, time of day and much more. You can tailor text content, images, clickthrough URL’s and more to change based on your chosen criteria.

The level of detail you can drill down to is almost limitless. You can also incorporate live feeds into your creatives, so they can pull live data from your website, or from a spreadsheet so that you can update content on the fly, avoiding the process of building and trafficking a new creative.

Whilst the build and set-up costs of a dynamic creative will be higher than a standard creative, if utilised correctly the value that they will return will more than out-weigh the equivalent cost of creating several standard creatives.

Today we’ll focus on the types of dynamic advertising possible on the Google network, by far the most popular platform for advertising with our clients at present.

There are various types of dynamic tools that can be used alone, or in conjunction to create highly targeted ads to boost interactions.

1. Remarketing
2. Managed content (Basic Dynamic)
3. Feed Content (Advanced Dynamic)

Remarketing

I’m sure we’re all familiar with remarketing ads at this point, you know the ones that seem to follow you around wherever you go online? Remarketing is a type of dynamic ad whereby after a user browses a product or page on your site, they are shown ads related to that product or service after they navigate away from your site.

I recently was browsing online for a dress for a friends wedding, and I’m still being plagued by ads in my Google and Facebook timelines, even though the dress is now hanging in my wardrobe.

Remarketing is great for ensuring that your ads are displayed to people who are most likely to follow through with an interaction or purchase and can be a very powerful way of reaching customers.

Managed Content

This is the most basic solution for advertisers who want to update the content of a banner on the fly. Say you have a standard animated banner with text, an image, and a call to action.

Using a Double-click basic dynamic feed set-up, our client can update this content on the fly, changing the content in a live banner to suit a current campaign. Content can be managed by the client, removing the time and costs involved for us or the media company to create and traffic a new creative.

The update-able fields allowed here are images, whole number, and text. You can have up to 25 dynamic fields per creative.

Although that might sound limiting, we’ve created some highly customisable banners based on these available fields for clients, e.g. inputting numbers in a dynamic field to set the visibility or order of frames, setting that size and position, colours, and even automatically hiding content on particular days of the week.

Basic dynamic creatives are a great way for small companies to get maximum value from a digital advertising campaign. 1 suite of banners can be updated limitlessly and can be visually updated to look like completely different banners if set up with future-proofing in mind.

Feed Content

Using Double-clicks advanced dynamic advertising capabilities in your digital advertising is where things really start to take off.

Basic dynamic creatives can be updated by a client, but the same content is shown to every view of the ad. Advanced dynamic takes this several steps further in that viewers of the same creative can be shown completely different content based on a tailored set of criteria, and is best used in conjunction with remarketing data, outlined above.

The criteria that can be customised to tailor content in a Double-click rich media ad is:

• Geotargeting by multiple geographic locations (e.g. city, state, zip code)
• Scheduling with start and end dates
• Targeting by DCM attributes (e.g. placement ID, ad ID)
• Passing first- or third-party data (e.g. audience segments) from publishers/data service providers (DSPs) on impression
• Remarketing using Floodlight tags
• Rotating creative iterations in optimised, random, or weighted ratios
• Combine multiple strategies listed above

Setting up your criteria is not as difficult as you might imagine. Google offers Google Docs integration, so that you can set up your creative feed, and update it on the fly via a spreadsheet.

Double-click offer a set of feed templates, browsing through these will give you a great insight into the possibilities here.

There really is no limit to the depth you can go into with targeting your audience. Whilst this is very exciting from a digital marketing perspective and might have some marketing managers chomping at the bit (please do get in touch if so!), it’s worth noting that it can be counter-productive to get too intimate with your customers.

The table below shows by percentage, how comfortable US users are with seeing personalised data being used in advertising.

The possibilities of dynamic digital advertising are only going to get more advanced from here, so it’s worth taking a second look at how you view your digital advertising campaigns.

With some careful planning and by looking towards the future, you really can get so much more out of your campaigns than you might think.

We’ve recently officially received out Google Partner status, to add to my status as a DoubleClick certified developer*, so you can rest assured that we have the expertise here at Friday to help you leverage Google ad technology to make the most of your digital advertising.

Please feel free to leave a comment below if there’s any aspect of the process that you’d like to see discussed in more detail in a future post. To kick-start your next dynamic campaign, and see how we can leverage the technology to suit your business, head on over to the Contact page and drop us a line.

*To read more about our Google Partnership status, and out DoubleClick certification, head over to Gavin’s post here.