Display advertising, sometimes also known as banner ads, is a type of digital advertising made to call for users to take on a specific action, like asking for a quotation of signing up for an event, through the adoption of compelling text, images, graphic designs and videos. Display advertising is essential for a well-rounded marketing strategy since they offer a wide range of ad styles and positions to highlight your products, services, and offers.

One of the key objectives of display advertising is to retarget or remarket your customers and encourage them to click onto your website once again to take the same action, or an action at a different stage of the funnel since people are found to develop and associate positive thoughts to mediums that they are already familiar with.

A research in 2020 concluded some of the key figures concerning some of the most preferred marketing channels amongst advertisers and marketers. Display advertising undoubtedly made it to the top of the list alongside videos, search advertising and social media. Display advertising is still considered as one of the most effective means in generating high impressions and engagements, hence keeping your brand front of mind with consumers. Being mobile responsive is also a key contributing factor to its success in the digital world, given that most browsing activities and buying decisions are made in our portable devices. And ultimately, display advertising campaigns do prove itself effective in stitching the consumer's journey together, cohering the sales funnel for an intact and personalized experience for your customers.

Define Goal(s) / Key Performance Indicator(s) - First, settle yourself with marketing goals and pick a key performance indicator (KPI) for your display advertising campaign that best describes the results you wish to acquire. It could be view counts for a video advertisement, or a fundraising target expected to meet three months from now. These statements will impact your media buying decisions as well as the creativity of your ads.

Always keep your goals achievable, measurable and time bound - providing a solid threshold to evaluate and compare the campaign’s performance later on.

Market research, or simply learn from your competitors - Market research entails data gathering from target demographics in order for a company to pull off their marketing and sales initiatives more effectively. Market research is the essential component of any business strategies, applicable to both B2B and B2C, in multinational scale or locally based. It gives businesses the right insights to make data-driven decisions. You could conduct research based on brand images, your competitors, customer segmentation, consumers review, and so much more. For those who just join the industry or conduct research for a new market/product, you could also take reference from what your competitors have been up to lately. Their practices, strategies and trials could serve as a framework for you to start off, and at the same time, learn from their mistakes too.

Know and define your audience - This is a vital step in your creation process as your findings will become the cornerstone for your success in display advertising. A wide array of factors come into effects including demographics, consumer behaviors, competitor’s market and products, time frame etc. If you intend to remarket a specific group of audience who has interacted or visited your website before, you may also want to apply segmentation or A/B testing for a more refined result.

Preparation of Production Materials - Before jumping to discussing creative ad angles with your display advertisements designs, you should have a dedicated landing page in place as well as a set of branding guides and materials ready, including brand logos, color tones, font choices, layout instructions etc. These materials and guidelines are crucial for your customers to develop familiarity towards your brands, and preferably with intuitive reasoning of your brand propositions and values. For example, color blue usually cultivates trust and professionalism while color purple is usually associated with creativity.

Measuring the success of your display ad campaigns should be quite simple if your campaign objectives and key performance indicators were kept specific and measurable. Evaluating the success of display ad campaigns entails analytics to the right set of performance data. If the display ads were meant for boosting conversion, you may need to focus more on how the ads were driving traffic to your landing page, and what actions they performed before reaching to your dedicated action hence considered a successful conversion. If your campaign was meant to increase awareness, ad clicks will be one of the determinants in measuring your display ad success.