Planning

Before you can start to plan your online activity you should be able to answer 2 key questions:

• What do you want to achieve?
• Who is the target audience?

From these you'll be able to set the overall objective for the campaign and the KPIs, for example to generate a number of visitors to your webpage.

If you know who the target audience is then we can use online tools to determine what they do online and how best to engage with them.

The objective will steer the media selection

If you want to reach a large volume of people interested in your offering then paid search might be relevant.

On the other hand if you want to raise awareness then display ads or even video ads might work better.

Rich media (such as expandable formats) can be very effective for getting an audience engaged with your brand so it's also important to think about how your creative will work. Video ads have been proven to raise brand awareness and can work in stream within an ad format or on a pre roll basis such as before videos on YouTube. To increase the reach of a campaign display ads can also run on mobile devices.

Planning with data

It's also important to think about what data you have available that can help with your planning. Media owners can place their tracking pixels onto key pages of the website (if approved) and anonymous data can then be used to target the inventory to similar users.

Some key questions to ask about your media plan:

• What is the maximum bid to be set at?
• Where is the inventory being bought from?
• Will the campaign include remarketing?
• How is the activity targeted? If it is contextual or behavioural, what are the behaviours or contexts that are being targeted?
• How will the activity be tracked?

Buying

Online media is bought in lots of different ways and there is always room for negotiation!

CPM is the standard buying metric which means the cost per thousand impressions. However, you can always pay on a Cost Per Click basis or a CPA basis (Cost Per Acquisition).

Display networks and ad exchanges

The most common method of buying display activity is through display networks or ad exchanges because they can be used both to reach a specific target audience and to generate responses. The Google display network, for example, reaches 80% of all internet users worldwide.

If media will be bought via the ad exchanges the Trust has an exclusion list for websites that we have identified that we don't want to appear on.

Inventory bought via display networks or ad exchanges can be bought using real time bidding so you need to have an idea of the maximum CPM you are willing to pay. You can then work this back to an effective CPM (eCPM).

Trafficking ads

Once the media placements have been bought the campaign will need to be trafficked through an ad server. We use Doubleclick which enables us to serve our own ads and control the targeting and optimisation of the campaign. We can also measure conversions and carry out attribution modelling looking at the full effect of all of the Trust's advertising.

Optimisation

Online activity can often be monitored in real time meaning that you can constantly be optimising the activity to work as hard as possible.

You can serve multiple creatives in rotation and change these throughout the campaign to the ones getting the highest clickthrough rates or you can increase bids to increase the volume of impressions.

It's worth having an idea when planning of what you are looking to test i.e. are you testing reaching different audiences or different creative messages.

These are some of the different ways of targeting across the ad exchanges:

Remarketing

Serving ads to users who have previously been onto your webpage but not converted

Contextual

Serving ads to users who are reading relevant content

Interest categories

Such as travel or finance

Predictive or lookalike

Serving ads to users who fit the profile of people who have previously clicked or converted

Behavioural

Serving ads to users who have behaved in a certain way such as clicked on competitors ads or visited similar websites

Measurement

Display advertising brings with it a whole new world of metrics but the starting point is always:

Clickthrough rate (CTR)

The number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of impressions, i.e. the higher the better!

Cost per click (CPC)

How much it is costing for each click to the site.

You should also always be able to measure back to onsite activity to be able to see how people interact with the website once they have landed there.

With display activity as well as tracking activity post click you can also track it on a post impression basis – this means that if somebody has viewed your ad but hasn't clicked on it but later visit the website their actions can still be allocated back to the media source.

When looking at the performance of online activity you need to think about whether the activity can be scaled. A placement might have delivered a very low CPC but it could be from a website with a small number of users.

There are also different ways to measure the success of the activity, for example you should look at both website analytics and the results from the display campaign to get an overall picture.

Any results should then be used to inform future planning.

Outline brief

It's worth keeping in mind this outline of items when composing your brief to the online marketers. It will help you to collate your ideas and intentions and aid them in producing the best possible returns for your ad campaign.

As with all these things it's always useful to have face-to-face conversation, if only to catch any niggles with the project up-front, before too much money and time has been spent incorrectly.

Online advertising brief

Objectives

Clarify the intentions of the advertising you're commissioning so all parties are clear about what you hope to achieve.

Audience

Give details of the specific audiences you wish to target.

Product/service

What are you advertising? Summarise the product or service as if you were a brand new customer who knew nothing about it.

Proposition

What is it you wish to get across in the ads – what is on offer to potential new customers?

Tactical activity

Let us know how specific you want to be when targeting the ads. Are you looking to only target families, young adults, or people living in a certain region?

Call to action

Is there a specific and short message (maybe related to existing collateral) that you'd like to use for the closing call to action?

Measurement

How do you want us to measure the ad campaign's success? There are many aspects of the result's data that could be useful, especially when informing your next similar campaign.

Budget

How much money do you have to spend? Always useful to know.

Timescales

Let us know how much time is available to produce the ad campaign.

Other information

The chance to witter on about any extras that may be relevant to the advertising you wish to create and run.