We see it all the time. You spend all this money and effort in creating these gorgeous HTML5 banner ads to be displayed across the Internet, but you can’t find a single one of them in the wild. It can be frustrating, especially as the days tick on and you haven’t seen a single ad anywhere. You begin to wonder, “are the campaigns even showing at all?” One word of advice is to rely on the data—ask to see the number of impressions being served in your campaigns and on what sites or apps they may have been displayed. In the meantime, let’s review as to why you might not be seeing your ads, but your clients are.
Reason One: Volume
With Targeted Display, advertising is precise and effective, but still subject to some limitations—like competition. Your ad needs to compete with all the other ads out there. So even if you’re looking at the right place, you may not be there at the right time. However, that’s not always the case for other users. When your ads successfully win their bids, those ads are prominently shown in front of the target audience, and continue to serve to those people wherever they may go!
Reason Two: Spend
With a limited budget, you get limited reach. While a smaller spend may make sense business-wise, it invariably leads to a limited reach. With 50,000 impressions a month, with each person getting targeted up to four times a day (in accordance with Gatorworks’ best practices!) what you will end up getting is an audience of around 400 people. If you don’t end up in this group, that’s actually a good thing! It ensures that you’re serving primarily to your target audience, not yourself.
Reason Three: Target
As is the case with many different advertisers, the people you target are not always people like you. As in, they don’t fall in your same demographic or perform the same actions. More importantly, they don’t know your product like you do. For example, if you sell a car, you likely already know that model exists! Or if you’re advertising for a retail shop, you’re likely already the type of user who knows about it. So we really need to find the people that don’t.
The AI that this targeting runs on uses a complicated live-bidding system to avoid serving to anyone except the ideal user. The people you want to bring into your fold are shopping at other places—places you might not be shopping, looking up keywords you don’t necessarily think of searching for—and as such the ads are shown to them, not you. It’s all working as intended!
Reason Four: Device
It often makes sense for certain campaigns to be optimized for certain devices. For example, a computer parts store is more likely to advertise on non-mobile sources and competitive cell phone plans are best put in front of people when they’re on their phones. It could be as simple as your campaign is best optimized to serve on the mobile and you’re only looking for your ads while on your laptop. This optimization can even come directly from your creative. If all you have are mobile-friendly sizes, then ad inventory is going to skew heavily in favor of your smartphone!
Reason Five: Bids
Lastly, it can sometimes be as simple as the amount you’re bidding on per ad. If you spend your time on high traffic, high-quality websites, many competitors may be spending more to make sure their ads show up more often. This is actually good for your campaign! It means you can get a wider reach without wasting money, even if it’s not a prime-time spot.
Gatorworks Is Suited For The Task At Hand
Ultimately, the question is not “Why can’t I see my own ads?”, but rather “Why should I see my own ads?” Every ad you see of yours is an impression lost, and while it can be nice to see your services working in action—your budget is better spent reaching out to new customers than displaying before your eyes. At Gatorworks, we do our best to make sure that the eyes on your ads aren’t just new leads, but leads best suited for your products and services!
Contact Gatorworks today at 225.924.6109 or get in touch with us online to begin serving your ads. Let’s get together to unlock your online potential!