What Are Rich Media Ads and How to Start Using Them
Long passed the days when you could engage users with a simple banner and plain advertising. The users matured with the market, and as online media got oversaturated with advertising, users developed ad fatigue or banner blindness.
An average Internet user is exposed to 1,707 banner ads in one month, while the average click-through rate (CTR) of the banner ad is only 0.11%.
Even large attention-grabbing banners embedded with relevant information remain unnoticed, as users overloaded with information get biased towards ads.
Does this mean that digital advertising lost its powers? Absolutely not, advertisers just need to use modern tools, such as rich media ads, which were introduced in the late 90s but are still overlooked by many brands. These ad formats demonstrate higher engagement, CTR and give advertisers better ROI for their ad spend.
Let’s review these cutting-edge advertising formats, how to deploy them, and how they can help get your message across.
What is rich media advertising?
The downward trend of ad viability was apparent since the early 2000s, and advertisers turned to newer ad formats to revitalize their ad campaigns and engage the audience.
Rich media ads are banners that include dynamic visuals, interactive elements, video bits, audio, animation, anything that makes them stand out.
As a rule, rich media ads can adapt to the visitor’s device and activities. For instance, they can
- expand if clicked or touched,
- change the position on the page,
- move with scrolling,
- rotate on hover, etc.
Rich media ads offer more options for interactions with the ads and provide a much more entertaining user experience.
Rich media ad formats are much more efficient in grasping viewers’ attention and leaving a lasting impression. On average, rich media ads have 6 times higher engagement rates than static display ads.
Rich media benefits for advertisers
CTR boost
Rich media elements are not the magic pill that will guarantee the efficiency of your ads. In fact, they require much more tuning and adjusting of the creatives to look organic and drive results. Yet, rich media ads command a much higher CTR than static banners. Even adding an out-stream video component to your display ad can add 15-20% to the CTR.
According to Admixer data, on average rich media formats outperform banners by 130%. The average CTR for in-page banners is only 0.11% while rich media formats can provide up to 1.5% CTR. Floating interactive elements perform the best in Belarus and Kazakhstan where they demonstrate CTRs of 3.33% and 1.42% accordingly.
Rich source of measurements
Due to a more sophisticated format and more diverse interaction options, rich media ads can deliver more statistics and insight into user behavior and intent. With rich media elements advertisers can not only measure impressions, but also video completion, display time, pre-interaction engagement.
Having all this data at hand, advertisers can better adjust their campaigns, A/B test more parameters, and craft a more comprehensive long term strategy for their advertising.
Rich media benefits for publishers
Access to more expensive demand
While still holding a large share of the market, static banners are gradually becoming an outdated ad format. Every year, rich media ads are getting more traction and adoption, given their outstanding results in engagement, and conversions. By limiting ad slots only to static banners, publishers are missing out on a large chunk of the demand.
The ability to serve rich media ads significantly expands the pool of potential advertisers and can ensure better eCPM rates.
Higher eCPMs
Due to the many benefits for the advertisers, rich media ads usually cost more than regular banner ads. Yet, they offer excellent eCPMs, compared to regular formats, and boost the publisher’s ad revenue while keeping audience loyalty and content experience in check.
According to Admixer data, the average eCPM of rich media ad spaces is around $0.14, while static banners provide a moderate eCPM of $0.018. Moldova publishers benefit the most out of rich media ad spaces with an average eCPM of $0.16. Rich media ad spaces also showed excellent output in Belarus with $0.06 eCPM.
How to make rich media ads?
Rich media ads do not necessarily require contracting an outside agency and can be easily built in-house. Creating and delivering engaging rich media creatives is more accessible than ever with modern Creative Management Platforms (CMP).
Such platforms allow advertisers and publishers to quickly make and deploy in-demand creative formats without endless adjustments. With CMP, you no longer need front-end skills or an agency to launch rich media campaigns.
How to deploy rich media ads quickly and cost-efficiently?
Admixer.Creatives allows users to build sophisticated rich media ads from scratch with an extensive library of templates. It is a SaaS solution, where you can assemble a creative, generate its code and add it into the publisher’s ad server or directly to the website.
Admixer Creatives platform works on the CPM model, where you pay only for the delivered impressions.
It provides an intuitive interface where you can choose from 25+ modern interactive formats, use it to launch your campaigns, and get real-time statistics on various creative performance metrics.
The process is straightforward:
- Choose a rich media format from the library of templates
- Adjust settings and upload assets (creative elements, images, videos, html files — depending on the requirements of the selected template) into the selected template
- Add event tracking from the external system
- Preview an ad on the demo page
- Get creative’s tag and add it as a 3rd-party tag to your DSP or place directly on a web page
Who can benefit from Creative Management Platform?
Admixer.Creatives is available as a stand-alone product, where you can add tags generated by Creatives into the major demand partners’ DSPs, SSPs and exchanges without any hassle .
Admixer.Creatives is also available as a module in our programmatic SaaS for advertisers — Admixer.DSP and Agency Tech Stack. With this module, you don’t have to worry about matching the code from the external CMP and can make a creative inside the interface.
Publishers can also use the advanced features of Admixer.Creatives, it is available as a module in Admixer.Network, our comprehensive solution for ad network owners and large-scale publishers. With it, you can deploy rich media ad slots on your website or app and get a better fill rate and ad revenues.
Examples of popular rich media formats
Rich media ads for desktop
- Cube
Cube rich media ad format that consists of 6 alternating stages any of which can offer video. Upon user-initiation, the banner floats above the page content.
The 3D cube automatically spins through all panels if the auto rotate option is enabled.
- Sticky Video
This is a rich media video ad that plays on a web page inside the content. This format allows you to minimize a video player and pin it to the corner of the browser window.
So, when a user keeps scrolling the page down and the player is out of the viewport, its minimized version keeps following the user and remains visible.
Rich media ads for mobile and tablets
- Mobile Swipe
The mobile rich media ad format allows presenting up to 5 images, which consecutively change. The images can rotate automatically or be rotated manually by clicking on a rotation button or swiping.
- Scratch Banner Ad
This interactive rich media ad format engages users to participate. Similarly to lottery tickets where you needed to scratch the shiny upper layer with a coin to reveal a win, this banner ad invites a user to “scratch” the top banner digitally.
Using a finger for mobile, or a cursor for desktop, a user reveals the image beneath.
To wrap up
Grabbing the consumer’s attention is getting more challenging for marketers, and rich media ad formats are one of the best ways to make your ads captivating and memorable. Static banners are no longer a viable strategy neither for advertisers nor for publishers.
In the increasingly data-driven digital advertising, rich media ads built through CMPs can provide an abundance of data not only on viewability and click-through rate but on engagement, video completion, and interactions, depending on the type of ad you crafted. It makes A/B testing, multi-variant testing, and optimization a reality for all sizes of in-house teams.
