Display Ads Overview - Requirements, Creatives, FAQ

Display ads are online ads that appear across prominently across third-party sites (i.e. wsj.com or weather.com). Display ads are a great way to provide air-cover marketing and raise brand awareness within target accounts and key stakeholders.  
The success of display ads are measured by the amount of target account traffic coming to your website rather than via clicks and conversions from the ads (because how often do you even click on a display ad?).  The lift of traffic can be measured in Triblio's Account Details report, Account Lift Report, and from Triblio's integrations with Google Analytics and your CRM.

Types of Targeting

With Triblio, you are able to target accounts at either the individual (email) level or at the account (IP) level.

CRM Targeting: If your ads are targeting the United States, you have the ability to target individuals from accounts and buying center you are looking to reach. 

The best results are yielded when you have a list of emails to target with display ads since the display ads work as air cover and then you run sales outbound campaigns at the same time.

In order for a display ad campaign to launch, you must have at least 100 emails to target.  If you don't have 100 emails, you can additionally add in 'Role Targeting' parameters (seen in Triblio's display ad element settings page) to add additional people.  To ensure you have enough individuals to run a display ads campaign you can use Triblio's 'Reach Estimator' to see the number of individuals available to target with the selected parameters.

Note: Triblio will not be able to say which individual email contact saw an ad, but instead which account saw the ad, due to email privacy laws.

IP Targeting: If you're looking to get full coverage within an account or are targeting outside the United States, you should use Triblio's Global IP Targeting ad group. This element type will target anyone at the account's IP target the countries listed in the location criteria in your connected audience.

Website Requirements for Display Ads:

In order to successfully launch your display ads, Triblio requires these parameters to be in place:

  • A privacy policy must be accessible by the user and state which types of tracking you do on your website (these parameters are placed by the Digital Advertising Alliance Self Regulatory Program (enforced by the Better Business Bureau and the US Federal Trade Commission) 
    • The policy needs to state that third parties (such as Triblio) may place cookies on their browsers for targeting
    • A description of the types of data that your site collects
    • Opt-out instructions for users who do not want to be tracked
  • You must have a functional website with a clear purpose
  • Website content must be family safe
  • Spam and malware is prohibited

Landing Page Requirements for Display Ads

  • Make sure your Triblio scrips are deployed on your landing pages.  If this is not done, we will be unable to track your clicks.
  • Clearly display your brand information and contain a link for the visitor to navigate to your main website
  • Have a link to your privacy policy
  • All form-collection information must occur over a secure server (https://)
  • All display ads must link to your own website or the creatives won't get approved

Landing Page Best Practices

We highly recommend sending ad traffic to un-gated landing pages.  Here are some examples:

  • Your homepage with personalized copy and a segment-specific CTA
  • A landing page with an un-gated white paper or ebook
  • A video recording of a recent webinar

Sending ad traffic to pages that require a form fill will result in high bounce rates and infrequent conversions.  It's much better to provide value up front and then ask for a conversion once the visitor is already engaged.  Also, since Triblio can identify accounts visiting your website, you can keep track of which target accounts are consuming the content, even if it's un-gated.  

Budgeting Display Ads

When configuring your display ads, you can apply a maximum spend per campaign to ensure your ads don't overspend the budgeted amount.  You also have the ability to set a daily budget cap so, if the audience is large enough to hit the cap, the ads won't spend more than that specified amount per day so they pace accordingly.

The actual spend an ad group will achieve per day is highly dependent on the type of ads getting run.  Email-targeted ads will typically spend far less than IP-targeted ads due to a large difference in the amount of matched devices available.  The number of accounts and the employee size of those accounts you are targeting in your ad group audience will also have a significant impact on the amount of budget you will spend.  

For CRM-targeted ads, Triblio has an in-app Reach Estimator available that will help determine how much reach your ads will get given their audience size and also recommended spend settings.  

Note: The Reach Estimator can take a few minutes to run due to the size of the database it is querying.  The more accounts you are targeting in your audience and the more departments/roles/titles you are targeting will increase the time to completion.  You can work in other tabs while this is running.

Display Ad Creative

Depending on the type of targeting you're doing (i.e. CRM vs. IP) Triblio accepts different creative types.

CRM-targeted Display Ads Creative:

For CRM-targeted ads, you can use either image ads or HTML5 ads. Only one ad size is needed to start a campaign but increased reach will occur when more than one ad size is used since different sizes have different placement availability.

Acceptable sizes:

    • 300x250 (Medium Rectangle)
    • 728x90 (Leaderboard)
    • 160x600 (Wide Skyscraper)
    • 300x600 (Half Page)
    • 320x50 (Mobile Leaderboard)
    • 970x250 (Billboard)

Image Ads: These consist of a single file that typically have a background graphic or color, a clear business logo, and a call-to-action. 

  • Format Guidelines:
    • Supported file types are: jpg, png, and gif (up to 30 seconds of animation, 15-20 fsp, no looping)
    • Up to 750KB in size for PNGs and JPGs, 3.5 MBs for GIFs, and 2MBs for HTML5s
    • Destination URL (including UTM parameters) is up to 1,024 characters, cannot contain redirects (ex. bit.ly), and can't direct to a video (ex. YouTube) or payment processor (ex. PayPal).  See landing page requirements for more.

HTML5 (Rich Media) Ads: These ads consist of multiple file types zipped together with more advanced functionality that encourage interactions.

  • Format Guidelines:
    • Each HTML5 ad needs to be its own zip files that should contain all code and assets.
      • Root folder should be a single, well-structured HTML document
      • Zip should contain all files referenced in the HTML document
      • The root file needs to be named index.html
    • Please do NOT include your own click events in the creative. This will result in multiple pages being opened upon click.
    • Links must reference file locations
    • Assets should be secure (https://)
    • There should not be any cross-domain scripting
      • It is best practice to include any javascript being used in your HTML5 in the index.html
      • Failure to do this could cause the creative to load slowly and/or to fail to render or animate
    • Animation limit of 30 seconds. No looping.
    • Max file size of 2MBs
    • Cannot contain font files
  • Technical Requirements:
    • Use the <!DOCTYPE html>, <html>, and <body> tags.
    • <meta> tags should be used to identify the size of an ad:
      • <meta name="ad.size" content="width=300, height=250">
      • NOTE: If this is missing, we will add it in, but we strongly recommend including it in your HTML5 file.
    • Declare a clickTag variable. ClickTag is a click-through URL: a shortcut to set the click-through URL in the platform.
      • <script type="text/javascript">var clickTag="https://www.domain.com";</script>
      • This must be passed as a parameter to any window.open event in the ad code.
        <div id="clickArea" style="width:300px; height:250px" onclick="window.open(clickTag ,'_blank');"

General Ad Creative Guidelines:

For IP-targeted ads, Triblio accepts image-based ads.

Image Ads: These consist of a single file that typically  have  a background graphic or color, a clear business logo, and a call-to-action. 

  • Format Guidelines:
    • Supported file types are: jpg, png, and gif (up to 30 seconds of animation, 15-20  fsp , no looping)
    • Up to 750KB in size for PNGs and JPGs, 3.5 MBs for GIFs, and 2MBs for HTML5s
    • Destination URL (including UTM parameters) is up to 1,024 characters, cannot contain redirects (ex. bit.ly), and can't direct to a video (ex. YouTube) or payment processor (ex. PayPal).  See landing page requirements for more.

Activating Display Ads

Once your display ads are created and activated in Triblio additional processes start taking place before the ads will officially go live.  The two biggest factors are:

  • Creatives will be initiated into a review process to ensure the creatives and landing pages meet the specified requirements. This process often takes 24 hours to complete.
  • For email-targeted ads, a cookie matching process will begin.  This process sends the targeted emails to LiveRamp, a data onboarding tool, which will then return cookies that the emails can be targeted with for display ads (expect a 50% match rate in this process).  This process can take a week to complete.
  • Once activated, the display ads will run for a minimum of a week prior to turning off.

Display Ad Settings

  • The default settings of for ads scheduling is Monday-Friday (22 days/month). This can be updated on the ad group.
  • The default day-parting for ads is from 6am-10pm EST. This can be updated on the ad group.
  • The default frequency for ads 8 impressions/device/8 hours. To update this, reach out to your

Baseline Results

Display ads are designed to build awareness and drive traffic to your website.  Due to the intricacies of account-based marketing, each audience you are targeting will have a unique baseline.  For example, if you're starting a campaign for net-new logos, you likely won't have high levels of traffic from those accounts on your site compared to if you're targeting open opportunities.

We strongly recommend for clients to take a baseline of target account activity within the audience they are looking to target for a few weeks (typically 3 weeks) to get a solid understanding of how their accounts are performing on the site.  Take note of the % of the targeted accounts coming to the site during this baseline.

Once your ads have been running for an equivalent amount of time that you took you baseline over, look at the same parameters (ex. % of the targeted accounts coming to the site) to measure the success of the display campaign.

Expanding Campaigns with Display Ads

While display ads function to build awareness and drive traffic to your site, you will want to run additional efforts to enhance these results.  
Examples of these campaigns are running 'air-cover' ads on accounts that your business development team is simultaneously emailing/calling into or enhancing the display ads by creating web personalizations to match the messaging displayed over ads.
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