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5 Reasons Your Online Store Ought to Switch to Dynamic Display Ads

Reason 1: You’ve got more than 100 products

If your online store has 100+ products, and you’d like to feature your product line in your display ads, then "basic" ad creative will end up being a tremendous amount of work!

Let's say your store has an average of 100 products at any one time. And over the course of a whole year, your store has 300 different products. You’ll need to make ads for all 300 products, and then have each ad created in a few sizes (ex: 160x600, 300x250, 728x90). That’s 900 ads per year that need to be created!

It's far more time- and cost-efficient to run dynamic ads, which automate the repetitive labor of creating product ads. With a dynamic display ad solution, it's just as easy to dynamically generate 100 different product ads as it is to generate 1,000, 10,000, or more.

Reason 2: You’re able to export an RSS or XML feed of your products

If you can generate a real-time product feed (like what you might provide for affiliates), you've laid a good foundation for a dynamic display ad campaign. Make sure to include any data that might be useful in an advertisement:

• Product name
• Product price
• Product images (in all available sizes)
• Sale price versus regular price (great for generating percent-off highlights, which can create more of a sense of urgency to buy now)
• Product description
• Product category (useful for grouping related products into the same ad)
• Special offer codes
• Offer expiration dates/times (like percent-off, a looming expiration date can encourage customers to buy now)

Reason 3: You’re already using an agency or DSP

In order to run dynamic display ads, which are also known as "third party ads," you’ve got to have access to either:

• A high-end self-serve ad platform, also known as a Demand Side Platform, or "DSP." DoubleClick Bid Manager or SiteScout are two examples, but there are dozens.
• Or you can hire an agency to manage your campaign (which means your agency is using a DSP to run your ads). Many types of agencies and vendors might be able to run dynamic display ads on your behalf: media agencies, ad technology vendors, or even many search marketing agencies. In the case of Canned Banners, our primary agency partner is Exact Drive.

DSPs and agencies will probably have budget minimums for running dyanmic display ads, but if you already have a DSP or agency, then chances are your ad budget is already large enough.

Reason 4: Your prices change all the time

If you’re an advanced online retailer, your pricing is probably being adjusted constantly based on demand, inventory, and expiration dates. This might mean as few as one or two pricing changes a day on smaller sites, or near-constant price changes for larger sites selling things related to travel (ex: plane tickets and hotel rooms), live events, or auctions.

Are you able to generate new banner ads every time the price of an item changes? Probably not, which means that "basic" display ads are going to deprive you of the opportunity to incorporate real-time pricing into your ad campaigns.

Dynamic ads solve this problem. Depending on how campaigns are set up, pricing can be updated daily, hourly, or even in real time.

Reason 5: Your ad budget has reached the "big leagues"

If you're already spending several thousand a month on basic (non-dynamic) display advertising, you might want to think about carving off some of your display budget to invest in dynamic display ads. Here's why:

• Basic (non-dynamic) display ads are great for "top-of-funnel" branding and awareness, but dynamic product ads might be better at converting buyers towards the bottom of your purchase funnel.
• Dynamic ads can make A/B testing easier, faster, and more scalable, which helps improve performance.
• Depending on how a campaign is set up, it's possible for dynamic display ads to "self-optimize." For example, dynamic ads can be instructed to promote your best-converting products more heavily. This simply isn't possible with basic ad creative.