Brand and online media – hand in hand

Utilizing your brand name content online effectively can become a powerful media tool if strategically presented in such a manner to attract both advertiser and consumers within a friendly online environment.

Julia Casale-Amorim, investigates this idea in her article ‘5 things a brand needs from its online media’ (imediaconnection.com) by further  defining a checklist which can be used to evaluate ‘your direct site buys or the practices and publisher compositions of the sites/networks through which you book your clients’ campaigns’.

The main aspects interpreted from her article to be qualities for any website are:

User experience

• Reduce the clutter on your pages by ensuring a clear layout of pages
• The less clutter the more your carefully positioned display ads will get noticed
• Ensure load time of pages is a few seconds. Users do not want to wait for content on a page to load and will tend to leave your site within the first few seconds if they wait too long. The quicker ads load, the likelihood of them being noticed increases.

Advertising standards

• Avoid positioning your brand amongst annoying site elements which, if not used correctly can seek to disrupt the user experience. Example – to many pop ups
• Ensure that there is useful information on your pages too, with a balance between content and display ads so as to not dilute the value of the content. 
• Ads in prominent positions are generally worth more as they increase the likelihood of maximum revenue from each impression because of their positioning i.e. above the fold
• Consider the type of display ads to appear on your pages. Do they work well with your overall positioning of your brand or are they contradicting and distasteful?

Design and layout

• Consider how you want to increase impressions of your display ads. One example is to breakdown content of a full article into smaller snippets so that users need to continue through each snippet to read further. By doing so they are exposed to other display ads on various pages. The downside of this is that it can become annoying and reduce the likelihood of users wanting to come back to the site.
• One effective way to display various ads without such a tactic as described above is to create an auto-refresh on your pages. At each auto-refresh interval, a new display ad is shown.

Placement frequency

• Consider where and how frequent your ads are displayed on the site. 
• For example, an offline campaign directing users to a specific landing page on your site, which also holds a display ad. This would be the first ad out of all ads throughout the site which is seen by those who have been targeted from a specific offline campaign.

Demographic composition

• For every site, it is essential to know who your target audience is so that you can seek prospects that relate to the skew of your audience. 
• Determine what aspects of your site would appear to those with a greater buying power such as key decision makers and build on these elements of the site.