There’s no doubt about it: Digital advertising must be a non-negotiable component of your company’s digital strategy. With the increased brand exposure, conversion rate boost and audience targeting capabilities, the benefits of digital ads are clear. So why are some companies still afraid to take the plunge? Robin Eldred, Communicatto’s Director of Advertising, explores 2018’s digital advertising landscape and covers everything you need to get started, including: - Types of digital ads - The benefits of various channels - How to run ads strategically - Ad reporting and optimization - Real-world results

1. Digital Advertising in 2018
February 22, 2018

2. Robin Eldred, Director of Advertising
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▪ robin@communicatto.com
▪ (403) 215-7504 ext. 104
▪ www.communicatto.com

3. Contents
1. What is it?
o A quick primer
o Facts & Figures
o What the ads look like
2. Why do it?
o What it can accomplish
o Versus traditional
o Why you may not be doing it
3. Best Practices
o The Process
o Reporting and optimization
4. Case Studies
o Real world results
5. Your How-to Guide
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4. WHAT IS DIGITAL ADVERTISING?
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5. The Digital Landscape
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6. What is digital advertising?
▪ Paid promotion of digital media
o The ‘P’ in the PESO model
o Content (text, images, videos)
▪ Channels (places to advertise)
o Social: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
- Influencer (leverage network of others)
o Search: Google, Bing, Yahoo
o Display: Banners, Videos
o Native: Articles
o Email (still a top performer)
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7. The history of digital advertising
Date Event
1994 First clickable internet ad (banner ad from AT&T, had a 44% CTR), first spam email
1995 Targeting begins
1996 Doubleclick arrives to help measure ROI
1997 Pop-up ads arrive
1998 Say hello to PPC, courtesy of GoTo.com
2000 Google AdWords
2002 Google introduces Quality Score
2006 Hyper targeting of ads, the first Facebook and YouTube ads
2010 Native advertising, promoted tweets in Twitter
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8. Facts & Figures
▪ Digital spend is 40% of overall
media spend last year
o Projected to reach 51% by 2021
▪ Display and search lead the way
▪ $228 billion spent last year in
digital advertising
o Projected to reach $375 billion in
2021
▪ $4.9 billion in Canada
o Projected to reach $8 billion by 2021
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Source: eMarketer

9. Digital ad examples - Search
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▪ Pay-per-click
o Position is based on bid and quality factors
Google searches:
2,000,000,000,000/year
63,000/second

10. Digital ad examples - Display
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▪ Image/video ads
o Surround a website’s content

11. Digital ad examples - Social
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▪ Text/Image/video ads
o Appear in line with content, or next to content, screen interstitial,
pre-/mid-/post-roll video
Social network Monthly Active Users
Facebook 2,070,000,000
YouTube 1,500,000,000
Instagram 800,000,000
LinkedIn 467,000,000
Twitter 330,000,000
Reddit 250,000,000
Pinterest 200,000,000
One to watch
in 2018

12. Digital ad examples - Influencer
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▪ The new version of celebrity endorsements
o A new breed of celebrity, including mid-tier influencers
o Anyone who has a loyal following
• Missy Lanning; 661,000 YouTube
subscribers
• Video to promote food subscription
boxes from Try The World
• ~800,000 video views
• By the way, Kim Kardashian was getting
paid $10,000 per tweet back in 2008…

13. Digital ad examples - Programmatic
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▪ Text/Image ads
o Function like an ‘advertorial’ – appear in line with content
o Great for promoting content (e.g. blogs, e-books, whitepapers)

14. Digital ad examples - Video
▪ Pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll
o Mid-roll is the top performer with 97% completion rate
▪ 15 and 30 second ad formats are top performers
o These are standard pre-/post-roll durations
o 20 second is the worst
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15. WHY DO DIGITAL ADVERTISING?
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16. What digital advertising can do for you
▪ Gets your content (ads) in front of people, in different
formats
▪ Advantages:
o Cost (much less expensive)
o Speed (time to get in market, ability to make
changes)
o Creative formats (images, text, video, interactivity, etc.)
o Targeting (Geographic, psychographic, demographic,
lookalike)
o Testing (ad variations, A/B testing)
o Measurement (real-time, meaningful data)
o Integration (analytics, tag managers, tracking pixels,
reporting platforms)
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17. Digital ad spending is massive
▪ 3.45 billion people regularly access the web
o 82% of all Canadians
▪ $4.9 billion to be spent on digital ads in Canada
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18. Digital vs Traditional
▪ 40% of all ad spending is on digital
o Even higher in Canada (49%)
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In Canada
49%
51%

19. Social media is everywhere
▪ 72% of people use Facebook weekly
o Ages 35-54 - 73%
o Ages 55+ - 61% (twice as much as the next highest social
platform)
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March 2016 July 2017 Gender Age
Daily or more Weekly Daily or more Weekly Female Male 18-34 35-54 55+
Facebook 54% 71% 55% 1.9% 72% 1.4% 79% 65% 82% 73% 61%
YouTube 23% 49% 28% 21.7% 60% 22.4% 56% 64% 80% 68% 32%
Instagram 11% 20% 20% 81.8% 30% 50.0% 35% 25% 54% 26% 10%
Twitter 12% 27% 16% 33.3% 29% 7.4% 22% 37% 41% 30% 16%
Snapchat 5% 9% 10% 100.0% 17% 88.9% 18% 24% 20% 24% 15%
Google+ 10% 21% 9% -10.0% 20% -4.8% 27% 11% 24% 19% 16%
Pinterest 8% 23% 7% -12.5% 20% -13.0% 18% 15% 38% 11% 1%
LinkedIn 4% 12% 7% 75.0% 15% 25.0% 10% 20% 19% 15% 12%
reddit 3% 5% 5% 66.7% 9% 80.0% 6% 13% 23% 5% 0%
Tumblr 1% 5% 2% 100.0% 5% 0.0% 3% 7% 7% 6% 1%

20. Social media in Canada
Canadian Users:
▪ Facebook: 19 million
▪ Instagram: 9.1 million
▪ Twitter: 7.5 million
Weekly Usage
▪ Facebook: 71%
▪ YouTube: 49%
▪ Twitter: 27%
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21. So why aren’t you doing it?
Chances are you may face:
▪ Lack of resources (time/money/manpower)
▪ Lack of skills
▪ Lack of understanding
▪ Lack of confidence
▪ Conflicting viewpoints
▪ Lack of insight
▪ Lack of stakeholder buy-in
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22. BEST PRACTICES
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23. ▪ Where a digital advertising strategy fits:
➢Communications Strategy
➢Digital Strategy
➢Digital Advertising Strategy
▪ The 5-step process for digital advertising:
Goals > Target > Channels > Creative > Execute & Optimize
▪ BUT, without a strategy this is a lot of guesswork
Best practices
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24. The 5-step process
1. Goals
o What are you trying to accomplish? What are your KPIs?
o Sound goals = sound measurement
2. Target
o Who are the personas? What are their requirements in order to
fulfill your goals? What do they need to see/hear/feel?
3. Channels
o Which platforms will best achieve your goals through the target
audience?
4. Creative
o The message/offer (e.g. images, text, video, etc.)
5. Execute & Optimize
o Measure against your KPIs. Adjust and test regularly. Data is your
friend.
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25. Selecting media channels
▪ Customer intent
▪ Customer presence
o E.g. Is your audience on Twitter? Maybe LinkedIn is better.
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Display
Social
Retargeting
Search

26. Measurement & Reporting Challenges
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27. Measurement & Reporting
▪ Validate the effectiveness of each channel/creative in
relation to goals, and optimize media mix
▪ Full “attribution” is very difficult, so focus on what you
can measure
▪ Good metrics have tangible outcomes
o E.g. clicks, social engagement, time on page, sign-ups, leads,
sales, video views
▪ Bad metrics are vanity metrics/noise
o E.g. CPM, impressions, social follower counts, bounce rate
▪ Let the data guide you, not your gut
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28. Sample Report
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29. CASE STUDIES
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30. Case Study: RAC
▪ Problem:
o Aging workforce, lack of interest in
railway careers
o Low budget ($5K media spend)
▪ Goals:
o Increase interest in existing college programs across Canada
▪ Actions:
o Multilingual landing pages extolling virtues of railway careers
o CTA: Request an info package from any of six colleges
o Advertising on Facebook and Instagram (image/text ads)
▪ Results:
o 12,800 visits ($0.39 cost per click)
o 2,100 requests for info packages ($2.38 per request)
o Lambton College: from 5 enrolled students to 510 interested
o Two Quebec colleges: 529 requests, 100 person waitlist
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31. Case Study: CEPA
▪ Problem:
o Misconceptions exist about safety and
environmental impact of pipelines
▪ Goals:
o Spread key messages to conditional opponents, conditional
supporters and academics
▪ Actions:
o Promote articles: Native Programmatic
o Promote videos: Facebook, Programmatic, and YouTube
▪ Results:
o 6,000,000 video views, 161,000 site visits, 24,000 social
engagements (95% positive)
o 96% reduction in cost per action versus previous year (go video!)
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32. HOW-TO GUIDE
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33. How does Communicatto do it?
▪ Strategy and planning
o Goals, budgets, requirements, targets, timeline, etc.
o Establish KPIs (i.e. what to optimize for)
o Community management plan (for social ads)
▪ Setup
o Tracking: pixels for ad platforms, analytics, etc.
o Landing pages: focused offering
o Setup of channels, development of creative
▪ Execution, optimization and reporting
o Change, test, update, modify
o Compare results to different timeframes/campaigns
(trends)
o Measure against benchmarks
o 50% data, 50% interpretation
▪ Health checks
o More in-depth analysis and higher level assessment
▪ Roll-up and closure
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Data
Analysis
Recommendations
NOTE: Track data at
both the ad channel
level and the website
analytics level

34. Your How-to Guide
What am I selling? ▪ What is my sales process?
▪ Where can digital advertising help? (i.e. at what points in the sales
funnel?)
▪ What are my margins? (i.e. what can I afford to pay per lead?)
How will I know I’m
successful?
▪ Determine what to measure
▪ Form submissions? Phone calls? Newsletter sign-ups?
▪ This will set your goals, and identify what to optimize for
Who’s buying? ▪ Who are my customers?
▪ Build personas. What do they look like? What do they do? What’s
important to them?
▪ Don’t forget demographics and psychographics
Where can I talk to them? ▪ Select appropriate ad channels
▪ Intent of prospect (i.e. location in the sales funnel) can help
▪ Search vs. social vs. programmatic vs. email list building
What’s the right content to
promote?
▪ What do my customers need to hear?
▪ What sort of content do I need to give them?
Execute, monitor, gather
data, optimize
▪ Run distinct campaigns - A start and an end
▪ Follow a reporting and optimization schedule
▪ Act! Make mistakes. Get better.
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Goals > Target > Channels > Creative > Execute & Optimize

35. QUESTIONS?
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and just one more thing…

36. Resources
▪ eMarketer (subscription required):
o US Social StatPack: Usage and Ad Spending for 2016-2020
o Digital Index for 2017: The Top 10 Digital Countries Worldwide
o US Total Media Ad Spending Growth, Digital vs. Traditional, 2016-2018
o Canada Forecast StatPack: Time Spent and Advertising Estimates, 2015-
2019
o Digital vs. Traditional Ad Spending Worldwide, 2017 & 2018
▪ The History of Online Advertising, AdPushup
▪ Online advertising, Wikipedia
▪ HubSpot:
o A Brief History of Online Advertising
o 7 Digital Marketing Strategies That Work: A Complete Guide
▪ 7 Types of Online Advertising, Adskills
▪ The Definitive Guide to Digital Advertising, Marketo
▪ Pay Per What? Choosing Pricing Models In Digital Advertising,
Marketing Land
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