Today I wanted to show you a few nice best practices and showcases where we see some nice successful digital campaigns for small and medium sized advertisers. So, the real long tail of advertising sales at publishers, and I want to show you how that works professionally, without any overhead, and really very high performing. So, without further ado, I’m jumping into a few cases that I want to show you. Very short recap, why are we doing Smart Ads the way that we do it? What are the current challenges in local advertising, especially when it comes to digital, that we see?
So, number one of those three major challenges that we see is price and quality of existing banners, so I took a few banners here from German speaking pages, and even if you’re not a German speaker at all, you will immediately see where the issue is. So, starting here, small images, too long, and too small texts, so probably a low click rate because it’s very difficult to understand what it is about, especially when I’m looking at mobile.

So here, next one, it’s really like the big question, is this print or is this digital? That really looks like a print media guy designing a digital ad. That is two different disciplines, and you really need digital guys building those digital ad campaigns, so that’s a good example for that. And obviously, a lot of newspapers use freelancers and sometimes then the attention to detail gets lost. Here we see a cut off banner. The frame should obviously go all around the ad, but here it doesn’t.
And last but not least, we have red on black, which is really hard to read, and if I’m now imagining this is a car dealership from Germany, which is Opel here, General Motors, or has been General Motors, and if I look at that, probably that’s not the image and not the colors, not the CI that Opal has for the rest of their ads, so I’m very sure that is not only low click-through rates, but also will create some trouble with the national marketing organization.

So, having that said, second problem is the landing pages, and if I’m talking about landing pages, we see a lot of local landing pages like this. Yes, the most obvious thing here is they are not optimized for all devices, but that’s not what I want to tell you because, obviously, a lot of the websites are not mobile optimized or optimized for the smartphones, but even worse is there is no call to action. So, what shall the user do? So, often we hear the advertisers after a digital campaign, especially after the first digital campaign complaining, “I did not get any feedback from users. There were no leads,” but if I do not know what to click as a user, and you make it that hard for me to make a lead, I shouldn’t be surprised that the leads are small.

And last but not least on this here, there are no latest offerings, but this is just a digital business card, usually with contents from 2010. Never updated since then, so combined with the call to actions so it’s really difficult. Why should I, even if I have a huge button on there, do any action? Because I mean what happens in my print ad, there is a special offering, 10% discount or something, it just doesn’t happen on the website, and then, number three is the overwhelming complexity. We see a few logos just to make that point. And what we see here is there are so many tools out there, so many options and so many different formats. I have so many CPM, CPC, CTRs, and passwords around there that it is obvious, and it is understandable, that a lot of advertisers, as well as sales reps say, “Okay, just let me do nothing. At least I’m not doing anything wrong,” so that’s the situation.

And we say, “Okay, how can we fix this?” And fixing is our approach with Smart Ads, starting from what we already have, and what we have is the blank print ad or sometimes only the advertisers URL. And if you look at this print ad of this contractor here, you at least have some information about him, so you have images, you have a few keywords about stuff he’s doing, you have his address, you have his latest colors and his latest logo.

And if we add that with everything that we can find about him in the rest of the internet, like from his homepage, from YouTube, from social media or from Google Places, that really makes a decent ad, and that is what we are all about, and this is the result that we get. We really get a decent and very high performing carousel ad like a best practice that we know from Facebook, Instagram, works very well and also works very well in local ads because what you see, you have a variety of images to show to the customer or to the user. It’s really intriguing to click there. It’s intriguing to interact even if you’re not clicking, but just swiping through the ad, and you also can integrate a few more slogans.

It’s not only about whatever you’re doing, in this case windows, but perhaps you’re also fixing the roof and you can just take the user wherever he’s interested, and then, he makes the click, and doing this from the print ad, we really get a nice recognition effect across all the channels from print to desk to mobile. You always see that’s the colors of the advertiser. That’s the slogans of the advertiser. That’s the images of the advertiser. This is really like him. This feels like him, and this is really like a high-quality product.

And high quality is also on the landing page, so we built a landing page for each and every of those carousel ads that we are doing, so in this landing page has a few great advantages. So, number one, it really opens in an overlay, so it’s extremely quick. You don’t lose the user, so he’s not jumping to a new website. He’s staying on your page as a publisher overlay.

And then, we have here, as you can see, a lot of information about this advertiser, which really helps to understand if I want to now get in contact with this specific advertiser, so in this case, he has a nice image. He has a nice about us text. He has a YouTube video. He has his opening hours from Google Places. He has navigation, so everything I need to interact with a local advertiser and not only the click out to the website, which we saw is not at the core of each and every local advertiser, but at the core is getting leads, and this is what we also focus with the call to action buttons that you can see here is sticky buttons on the page, and we see, yes, you can visit the website, but more important, you can email him, you can call him, and you can get navigated to the shop because we have the Google Maps integration. And we obviously see that especially on mobile, the call option and navigation option are used much more often than visit the website or email.

So, we not only make the landing page relevant to the user, but for the first time we offer the different contact ways that on this specific device he really needs, and with this, we hope to and see in a lot of cases that we solve the three major challenges, so great banners without any overhead from advertiser sales reps. This is based purely on what we get on the internet and on the print ad. We have a great matching landing page out of the box, and especially, we have one simple offering. That’s what I haven’t told you yet, so we’re always about giving one price on one fixed bundle. So, for example, 100-euro, 5,000 ad impressions, and included is already the landing page and the banner.

That’s an easy model, and for you as a publisher, it gives a high, eCPM, 10, 15 euros plus but it’s very easy for the advertisers. It’s not to think about, “How many impressions do I need to be relevant? Do I need regional targeting, or don’t I need it? Do I save the money to get lower with the eCPM? Which of the 17 different formats do I need?” It’s really simple. There’s one format, especially the medium rectangle, brackets. We can do more, but we always advise to start with the medium rectangle, especially for long tail, and we have one simple model, and then, we can really scale it.

And how does that look? I can show you. If you’re interested, just reach out. I have a lot of examples. I can show you some really nice click-through rates that we have. I can show you some examples from a print ad of yours. Just send me something over. You see my contact details here. Drop me a line. Call me. Request a contact on LinkedIn, whatever you like. More than happy to discuss, or you are different, if you have a different opinion on that, or you have a different approach to solving the long tail SME display advertising problem, reach out. I’m super happy for all the discussions. This is really a passion for us and yeah, reach out and hopefully see you soon and discuss about long tail advertising. Thank you so much. Have a great day.