The Technical Elements of Launching a Successful Interactive Advertising Project
Technology has literally changed how advertisers communicate with their audiences. Interactive advertising is the norm for most companies now because it elicits reaction. Interactive advertising campaigns can easily be tweaked because the actions and behaviors of users can be analyzed minutely. Analytics are further tracked to continue refining the ad, increasing its success rate. Without the right IT infrastructure and systems in place, however, an interactive advertising campaign can be difficult to manage.
Interactive advertising has several advantages over traditional forms of advertising. Interactive advertising gets people’s attention, delivers a more nuanced message, and employs emotional appeals. However, launching a successful interactive advertising comes with several challenges because bandwidth requirements are much greater for it, production costs are high, and there are several parties involved in the campaign (agency, client, production house, technology vendor, etc.). Here are some factors to keep in mind that will help you launch a successful interactive advertising project.
When it comes to technical issues, there are three key factors to success for hosting an interactive advertising campaign and they are delivery, availability, and performance. When planning your interactive advertising project, you have to determine whether you are going to outsource or use your current infrastructure. If you are working with your current infrastructure, a network delivery speed of 100 Mbps or 1Gbps may be sufficient. But if you plan to bring in external resources, you may want to consider upgrading your office connection to shorten transfer times. The last thing you want to do is commit to a contract if it will take you days to deliver updates to your partner. Use a bandwidth calculator to determine your transfer needs. You should also consider purchasing internet connections from separate internet providers to prevent total outages. Or you can eliminate this concern altogether by outsourcing your content delivery needs.
Another issue is that no one wants to go through a slow interactive advertising experience. As the performance of home networks and mobile devices improves, the attention spans of internet users are shortening. You have to get their attention in just a few seconds. Therefore the fast delivery of your content is vital to your success. Some factors that will improve interactive advertising performance include hardware, code, network throughput, hard drive speed, CPU performance, and much more. Work with a provider and have them help you identify and alleviate these issues.
Understand Your Audience/Reach
To be able to frame your budget and technical expectations properly, it is essential to understand the reach of your interactive advertising campaign. If you know the size of your audience, you will be able to maximize your campaign’s ROI and plan to work with partners for scalability to enable growth rather than inhibit it. In order to determine the reach of your campaign, think about how many unique visitors you expect and how many visitors you will come to reach. This will help you determine your storage needs, revenue projections, and other factors. Hardware/delivery requirements can be defined by knowing approximately how many visitors will hit your infrastructure at peak times. Interactive advertising campaigns can generate millions of visits even over just a day or two. Just work with your provider to ensure that you can plan for and react to a situation like that.
When you create a successful interactive advertising campaign, one of two things can happen. Either your site infrastructure cannot handle the spike in traffic and your campaign fails or your campaign absorbs all the traffic seamlessly and you achieve great success.
There are many technical and business considerations you must make prior to launching your interactive advertising campaign. Ask yourself if you can do it yourself or if you need to seek outside help, how you can get your content out there, and how you can ensure that your content remains available even when your site experiences a substantial growth in traffic.
Other Tips for Interactive Advertising Success
The key to success in interactive advertising is to not just focus on rich media but to integrate it with other ad formats such as email. An important trend is adding voting and sweepstakes to online interactive advertising campaigns. Marketers can use rich media ads to ask consumers their opinions and then use that information as feedback to engage their customers better. When you ask a customer’s opinion and then offer them something in return, you have a better chance of converting them. Of course the most important element of such an offer is the offer itself. For users to be willing to share their personal information with you, the offer has to be pretty good. The response rate will vary depending on the offer you make.
Although the overall online marketplace has seen a slowdown, companies are still investing substantial amounts of money in interactive advertising. Why? The returns that interactive ads give both through conversions and metrics are unmatched.
