There’s something about advertising online that makes some marketers forget all they once knew about the marketing basics. We’ve seen it most dramatically recently in the full-scale social media pushes that some companies are making. For example, in the gold rush to grab precious social media eyeballs, all strategic concerns are forgotten. So if you’re considering moving a portion of your traditional ad spend online, here’s a list of common mistakes that we see some display advertisers make when they start managing their own campaigns for the first time.

1.  Not Testing Creative

When it comes to basic industry best practices, display is no different from any other advertising medium. Though experience helps in determining what creative, tagline or call to action will work best for your brand, the most successful advertisers allocate a portion of their spend—particularly early on in a campaign—to A/B testing creative elements. It might not seem like a color, word change, or even an exclamation point could make a huge difference, but it often does.  You test layouts and colors and fonts in your print ads so why not do it online too? Try different things online in small batches across a broad swath of media and heavy up on the components that work.

2.  Not Ramping-up Properly

Any campaign can benefit from a ramp-up period. The temptation at the start of a campaign is to want to see dramatic results quickly. However, particularly when you’re working within an auto-bid or optimized framework, the results will be better later on if the campaign starts slower and makes common sense optimization changes incrementally until the optimum performance pockets are found and scaled. This lets your platform of choice learn where the valuable impressions are and pick more like those in the future.

3.  Not Focusing on Performance

With the proliferation of all sorts of data, there is a strong temptation to want to limit buying to a very narrow demographic segment because you have always marketed to that particular audience effectively. However, just because you can buy highly specific segments doesn’t mean you should when online. Most campaigns are more effective when there are a wider range of potential impressions to bid on. Some campaigns can benefit from a very high CPM and a very narrow slice of the population, but this is not true for most advertisers. If this is your first foray into display, cast your net a little wider and look for those wonderful serendipitous discoveries that work for your brand.

4.  Not Addressing Saturation

You can saturate your audience with a message in any medium and nowhere is that more true than when you are online because it’s so easy to acquire massive amounts of media.  It’s easy to launch your campaign, arrive at the right media mix and creative elements, then let it run its course.  But a long, multi-month flights should have multiple creatives and messages ready if and when performance drops off.  A smart frequency capping strategy helps but even with just a few daily exposures your customers can get turned off quickly.  Change it up regularly and see if that doesn’t keep the conversions coming right up to the ending bell.

If you can avoid these simple newbie mistakes you’ll be on your way to a successful display campaign. All it takes is a little know-how, a little experience, and a lot of common sense and you will quickly find the combination of tactics that work for your particular brand online.

The article How About a Little Revolution in Display Advertising by Martin Betoni is a good, hard look at how display dollars break out of the total ad spending in 2008 according to the latest IAB annual report. Of the $187 billion spent on advertising in 2008, $24 billion were online dollars of which only 17%, or roughly $5 billion, went to display ads. In other words just 3% of the total ad spend in 2008 went to display. His point is that the banner has not progressed much and I find it hard to disagree. All the best optimization in the world is still completely reliant on the creative to engage the user. This is why I think technology around the creative, things like our new AdMatch capability which provide a dynamic creative directly from the advertiser’s database of products or services and matches them in real-time to the highest performing content, have the greatest opportunity to increase the display share of ad spend and tip the scales away from search or even draw dollars away from the larger pool of traditional media. A campaign is only as good as it’s creatives and as Martin points out we are still basically working with the same 728 pixel by 90 pixel rectangle from 1994 to get the job done.