A good creative is key to any successful advertising campaign. This is something we’ve been saying to our clients for a while and we now have the capabilities for creative design and development in-house. Adding these skills to to the team enables us to take an holistic approach to the the campaigns we run. It’s important to put the right message in front of the user at the right time in the right place and, to do so, it starts with the creative. The best media placement in the world can’t have any impact if the creative is no good.

For Chemist Direct, Europe’s leading online chemist, we’ve built a number of offer-led HTML5 creatives and a dynamic creative (left) showing the user the last product they viewed. This is just the beginning of the dynamic creative possibilities. As well as the last product viewed we plan to build further iterations, including: pulling in the most popular product by category; last products viewed by highest margin; and last products viewed by highest review rating.

We see dynamic creatives as key to engaging with users. If we can put tailored and relevant content in front of users as they are browsing the web, this is of benefit to the advertiser and the user. Since running a 300×250 dynamic creative we have seen a CTR of 0.17% compared to 0.08% for a static creative. This is a good indicator performance has improved but, as we all know, CTR isn’t everything and the number of sales and amount of revenue generated are the most important metrics.

Technical challenges

Building the dynamic creatives using DoubleClick Studio has provided a number of technical challenges. For the Chemist Direct ads we are using the product feed from their API. This ensures the feed is updated daily but has thrown up a number of problems around varying image dimensions. When building or re-designing a website advertisers must think carefully about who will be using the data and for what purpose. Standardizing image dimensions, product descriptions by character length and ensuring all products have key fields completed would greatly improve the number of products being shown in a dynamic creative and the speed at which these ads can be built.

For more information on creative, we’ve written elsewhere about the benefits of building creatives in HTML5, building social banner ads and the key elements which impact creative performance.