Using Text Plus Image Placements on AOL Website Targeting

What are Text Plus Image Placements?

Text Plus Image Placements (TPI) are placements offered by AOL which allows advertisers to enhance their AOL Website Targeted ads with an image, these images may be a logo or any relevant picture. This image appears to the left of the text ad and is clickable. The goal of using a TPI is to enhance the appeal of the text ad, potentially driving additional traffic to the advertiser’s page.

How does it work?

When running a website targeting campaign with AOL, a relevant image may be added to standard text ads.  If AOL serves an ad on one of the eleven properties that currently allows images (see catalog below), both the image and text ad appear.  Advertisers can run a TPI ad campaign on the AOL website targeting network, however, due to the low volume, it is recommended to fold this into a more robust website targeting campaign.

The TPI specifications are as follows:

• Image Size: Minimum of 50×50, even though sizes will vary from website to website, scaling as huge as 100×100
• Text: 25 characters for the title and 70 characters for the body
• File Size: 20K

TPI enabled sites:

AOL Money and Finance	WashingtonPost.com
TMZ	Regional TV LLC
Parade	AOL Real Estate
SI.com	AOL Autos
Mail.com	Slate
Premium Publisher Newsletter

Advantages of TPIs

Website Targeting is often viewed as an advertising opportunity that generates higher impressions than paid search, but lower actual clicks. This is because consumers are actively seeking information with paid search, while with Website Targeting the advertiser is making an assumption of the audience based on website’s content.

Additionally, a lot of advertisers can be displaying text ads to the same users at the same time further decreasing the chances of consumer interaction with any one particular ad. By giving consumers a more appealing ad, there’s a potential to increase the CTR, which could lead to a significant impact on the total number of clicks even if it is a small total percentage.

Disadvantages of TPIs

TPI would only make up a small part of a paid search campaign on AOL as it’s only viable for a small number of sites, which within an AOL campaign can result in a microscopic portion of the overall digital campaign.

Recommendations

Text Plus Image ads could be beneficial to any advertiser running Website Targeting on AOL with their increase in ad appeal and the potential increase of CTR’s. However, we encourage running a test initially. While it may be assumed that CTR would increase, it should not be assumed that conversions would increase proportionately, if at all. This is because there’s a possibility that the consumer would be less qualified, and is only clicking on the ad with an image because it sticks out more than another and not taking the time to read the call-to-action within the text ad.