Vanity metrics obscure ad performance. So, what can uncover its real impact on the bottom line? Re-evaluating your display advertising strategy.

Marketing’s traditional roadmaps have become redundant. And are often devoid of any real value, echoing the same old sentiment: what really matters?

With this in mind, marketers have amped up their infrastructure and frameworks. But clusters of ill-fitting leads and low conversion rates are still rampant across the business landscape.

It’s a conundrum.

Marketing can access relevant intent data and the right tech. And the skeleton to leverage the ingredients optimally.

But their display advertising strategies still fall flat. The average display ad conversion rate in B2B is 0.3%, meanwhile the average CTR is 0.46%.

B2B display ads have been underperforming compared to other marketing channels, whether initial engagement or final conversion.

Why Is Your Standard Display Ad Strategy Posing a Problem?

Display ad impressions are relatively low. When you combine low CTRs with low conversions, it pinpoints a broader funnel leakage.

But even the savviest of marketers overlook this.

Because often, impression-level metrics, such as CPMs, are offered precedence. This is what’s truly broken. These numbers delude you into thinking that the campaigns are effective.

The truth is, they are burning the budget.

Marketers are increasingly sold on the promise of behavioral targeting, predictive intent, and AI-driven audiences.

On the flip side, it’s actually all performative.

This delusive promise of precision holds marketing responsible to the very nib. And the final numbers illustrate this disjuncture. They highlight passive awareness over quality acquisition.

It’s marketing’s core belief that precision equals performance. But this has actively become a marketing frustration – why aren’t our targeted ads converting?

It all boils down to the hollow assumption that precision equates relevance and value. In line with this false belief, marketers continue to:

• Focus their micro-targeting tools on vanity segments
• Gauging false confidence from inferred intent
• Optimizing for those who ‘look’ like your buyers

The result?

Decrementing ROI.

The counter-solution: You must reverse-engineer your display advertising strategy to extend measurable value.

Adopting a 360-Degree View of Your Display Advertising Strategy

At the crux of an upgraded framework lies leveraging audience intelligence. It’s simple data or insight into your audience.

Start vamping up your strategies here.

So, what exactly is audience intelligence?

It’s collating, analyzing, and practically applying audience data to understand the three basic figments:

1. Who is your audience?
2. What do they care about?
3. How do they behave across multiple digital platforms?
4. When are they most receptive to your marketing messages?

This data collection comprises more than just demographics or firmographics, i.e., job titles and cookie-based lookalikes. But also behavioral, contextual, and psychographic data points that surpass surface-level filters.

It’s an entire amalgamation of your audience’s engagement patterns, motivations, their positioning in the buyer’s journey, and the number of touchpoints they’ve had with your brand.

It’s comprehensive to the speck.

Audience intelligence replaces outdated buyer personas. With this, businesses can show ads to users with real buying signals. And the marketing messages are tailored to psychological readiness, not an assumed persona.

It’s about avoiding burning your budget on audiences who aren’t even in-market. So, to streamline this, audience intelligence offers insight into deep engagement patterns, not generic interest categories.

It’s not just about who your audience is, but what they are doing, feeling, and deciding.

These are the building blocks that must support your actual display advertising strategy. It’s not a suggested pivot, but imperative to refine your display ad conversion metrics.

Display Advertising Strategy: Meet the Desired Reach and Conversion Goals

The primary focus must transcend technical optimization. Pivoting to a more comprehensive framework is paramount. One that not only aligns with business expectations but also helps you rethink targeting.

Any of your display advertising strategies should begin with micro-studying conversion patterns. From there, you move bottom up to refine the messaging, targeting, and delivery.

A smarter, strategic framework will help you reiterate the overall role of display ads in funnel optimization. And this particular one moves away from the obvious fundamentals, such as outlining campaign goals or prioritizing brand consistency.

1. Display ads as a funnel stage-specific touchpoint

In marketing, timing is everything. You cannot throw display ads at random points and call it a day. Display ads aren’t just wallpapers. They are their own marketing channels.

With multiple touchpoints in tow, each impression must hold value. And this starts with stage-specific targeting.

The actual role of display ads changes according to where the prospect is in their buying journey. It becomes critical to not only align the targeting approach but also the creatives and messaging with their needs and readiness to buy. 

For example, an account just aware of a problem might require a more informative ad. Meanwhile, one in the consideration stage who is comparing pricing models would require customer success stories to sway them.

Marketers often make the error of using display ads to push customers towards conversion. But with display ads, you can create tiers of touchpoints.

You must create your display advertising strategy to tie directly with the different stages of the buyer’s journey:

• Educational ads to build brand recall at the awareness stage.
• Retargeting through mid-funnel content to persuade low-interest prospects.
• Conversion-centric messaging for those with deep intent (such as products added to their carts).

It all depends on the strategic sequencing of your display ads.

Owing to this, you’re allowing your prospects to progress through the funnel naturally. And none of your ad impressions end up wasted on those not ready to convert.

2. Context and intent-driven targeting, not demographics-centric.

Digital advertising no longer rests on the backbones of demographic targeting. Marketing realized that it’s too broad to gauge modern buying patterns. They never outlined the whole story of who the buyer is.

Marketing should gauge where buyers are coming from, the content they’ve previously interacted with, and the intent signals they are giving off. The nuances have become vital.

So, advertising has gravitated towards being more context-driven. It has adopted advanced tech to track and interpret real-time user behavior.

In this cluttered landscape, you can’t just target CMOs of mid-market fintech companies. You must focus on the intent behind their searches. What are they looking for? Are they also interacting with competitor content?

You get into the buying committee’s mind. Not just to understand them from the exterior characteristics. Contextual and behavioral signals, such as page depth, time on a webpage, and engagement levels, offer a far granular picture.

They help you distinguish between accounts – who is interested in interacting and who is merely browsing. Each data point is imperative. And will allow you to construe ads that match the prospect’s mindset and their position in the buying journey.

With this, your display advertising strategy is ascertained to be in tune with those it reaches. Or you’re just flying darts directionless.

This approach will ultimately help you target your audience within the relevant context and intent, leading to meaningful conversions.

3. Shift from only measuring CTRs to value-driven, meaningful metrics

Digital marketers are over-relying on click-through rates as the primary metric for success. This is one of their biggest mistakes.

CTRs are impressionable metrics and significant. But they offer a far simpler view into the effectiveness of your display ad campaigns.

To get a more molecular understanding of their campaign’s performance, marketers must pivot to metrics that demonstrate engagement quality. These include impressions such as time on site and interaction rate.

Metrics like these tell you how your ads impacted the user, which is fundamental to guiding them down the funnel. It’s about how well your ad grasped their attention. Someone who spends time on your website browsing but doesn’t click right away is way better than someone who clicks but bounces immediately.

You must understand how your audience is truly interacting with the brand. The same works with hover time or view-through rates – they demonstrate how engaged a prospect is, even if they don’t click.

The goal is to make an impression and leave an impact.

Further down the line, such metrics offer the bigger picture. And the number of conversions your display ads influenced down the funnel, even if it’s not the direct trigger.

Moving away from only measuring vanity metrics can help you understand your display ad’s overall performance. Whether it’s the creative’s resonance or the design’s engaging factor – this pivot helps refine the nitty-gritty.

4. Testing creatives, the strategic assets of your ad campaign.

Generally, display ads are perceived as secondary assets. The campaigns are launched and forgotten, except for the performance-tracking function.

But in high-performing ad campaigns, display ads aren’t mere creative tools but strategic assets. The creatives aren’t just pieces of content. Here, they drive a purpose and should align with your audience’s expectations at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Testing your ad creatives is synonymous with testing product features. So, it isn’t about creating appealing visuals but psychological triggers. If your creatives aren’t rooted in understanding the buyer’s mindset, it’s just clear-cut noise.

Impactful creatives aren’t just for show. They speak to the buyer’s emotional and cognitive state. This requires dissection of buyer motivation at each stage of the funnel and tailoring messages accordingly.

For example,

Awareness: Your creatives must instill curiosity. And validate the problems buyers didn’t realize they could have. This reduces friction from the get-go. You’re indulging them in thorough questioning and offering provocative insight. It’s not about selling, but sparking intrigue.

Consideration: Here, the stakes have slightly shifted. Your creative must build trust and credibility. Hence, testimonials, social proof, and value propositions take precedence at this stage. Your messaging must answer – why you are in the most logically and emotionally assuring way possible.

Conversion/Final Decision: The final decision is driven by urgency and clarity of purpose. The right creative can help the hesitating buyer remove any confusion and doubts. At this stage of the buyer’s journey, your ad creative must factor in the following:

1. Simplifying the choice.
2. The cost of inaction
3. Ease of conversion

Every headline, CTA, and graphic serves a purpose. So, test with the right intent and ask these fundamental questions:

• Can your creatives provoke action?
• Does it align with buyer expectations?
• Does it meet the prospects where they are exactly?

Your Display Advertising Strategy Must Align with the Overall Buying Experience.

When isolated from the rest of the marketing functions, display ads seem like a shot in the dark. But they aren’t meant to be.

Display ads should be a checkpoint pinpointing your buyer’s evolving experience as they progress down the journey. But without a strategic display advertising strategy, all this can easily be laid to waste. And skepticism, friction, and drop-offs have become a common occurrence.

This must be avoided.

Your strategy must mirror the buyer’s real-time experiences, both emotional and contextual relevancy. Only then you can build a narrative that flows naturally across platforms and funnel stages.

One that actually converts.