You can optimize and nail down your target group all you want and still not have successful results, all because your offering or creative just isn’t attractive or eye-catching enough.

Because of the impact of creative on campaign performance, we regularly discuss this here at Admedo. What makes a creative great? What really works? Naturally we want you and all of our clients to be as successful as possible using our platform. To help you get there, we have collated some of our top tips for creative success, so you can make use of the knowledge we’ve gathered at Admedo over the years:

1. THE OFFERING – What are you advertising?
   Is it a product that people normally buy or something new that they have never heard of? Selling things that people normally buy online like concert tickets or subscriptions tend to work better than selling candy (which you can just buy in the grocery store) or something you’d need to try out before you buy it, like a bed.Decide what kind of campaign you’re running and adjust your banners to match the effort. If the campaign is for branding you might want your logo and slogan to be big and if it is for a performance metric such as clicks or conversions you’ll want to be bold with an offer.
2. THE CREATIVE SIZES – The 3 top sizes of online Display right now are 300x250 (MPU), 160x600 (Super Sky) and 728x90 (Leaderboard). With these three sizes you will qualify for 96% of the traffic out there. That’s enough. If you really want to be able to grab 100% of the impressions you win, get all of the standard sizes you can run. Admedo allows everything IAB-recommended – you’ll find them here.
   • Is it a product that people normally buy or something new that they have never heard of? Selling things that people normally buy online like concert tickets or subscriptions tend to work better than selling candy (which you can just buy in the grocery store) or something you’d need to try out before you buy it, like a bed.
   • Decide what kind of campaign you’re running and adjust your banners to match the effort. If the campaign is for branding you might want your logo and slogan to be big and if it is for a performance metric such as clicks or conversions you’ll want to be bold with an offer.
3. MAKE SURE YOUR BANNERS ARE RELEVANT AND UP-TO-DATE – This can have a huge impact on the success of your campaigns. For example, we’ve run campaigns that advertise winter tires only when it snows or home delivery of ice when the temperature reaches above 80F. Campaigns for universities run in the months before application season and diet campaigns after Christmas to February, in May – June and just after summer when people are shopping to get fit.
4. CALL TO ACTION – This is a great opportunity to experiment. Create a call to action (CTA) that your target customers can’t refuse! Don’t make people guess what your message is - be clear and exciting; tell your users what you want them to do and how to do it.
5. STAND OUT - Once you have your offer, CTA and timing on lock, you need to create a banner that is visually eye catching and stand out. Make your message short, clean and in-line with your CTA. Use bold fonts, strong, relevant images and make sure the colors are vibrant and contrasting so they really stand out.
6. CHECK YOUR LANDING PAGE – On the other side of the banner experience, it’s all about clarity.  A successful campaign and banner has to have a good landing page. You can read all about how to nail it here.
7. LINE UP WITH THE CREATIVE SPECIFICATIONS – An ad has to look and feel like an ad, adapt to some basic ad-manners and actually advertise what you say you’re advertising. Since Admedo is a premium DSP, we audit all of our campaigns with great care. We do this to be able to buy from the best exchanges and inventory that’s out there. Read up on the do’s and don’ts and make sure you’re in-line with the creative specifications so your campaign will get approved quickly.

When following the above advice, you be sure your campaign will be off to a great start. But there’s still more to learn on how to test and optimize your creative for an even better campaign. So stay tuned for more helpful content on this blog in the near future.

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