What is a Lightbox Ad and What are its Benefits?

Lightbox ads are a powerful and adaptable format type for the Google Display Network. Their interactive nature and responsive design allow them to fit into virtually any Display campaign and serve a number of campaign goals, such as driving conversions or building brand awareness.

This discussion will explore what is a lightbox ad, why advertisers use this format so prevalently and the many benefits of GDN lightbox ads.

What Is A Lightbox Ad?

Lightbox ads are rich and interactive ad experiences on the Google Display Network. They work by capturing user’s attention with a smaller ad, usually in the form of a video or picture display. When the viewer clicks or hovers over the ad, it expands into a larger ad experience.

Why Are Lightbox Ads So Popular

The Lightbox ad gets its name because when this marketing message is clicked, everything around your ad is dimmed, creating the lightbox effect. This ensures that the potential customer is spending 100% of their attention on your ad, and not any of the content surrounding it.

When lightbox ads are interacted with in this way, it creates an immersive experience, which is a benefit of using a lightbox ad. Viewers can scroll through images, watch videos or otherwise interact with the ad. Not only does this create much higher engagement than traditional Google Display Network ad types, but it also creates a memorable experience that drives conversion in the future.

The Benefits Of Using Lightbox Ads

There are a number of benefits to using a lightbox ad. It’s difficult to narrow it down to just one advantage! If you’re ever asked which is the benefit of using a lightbox ad, you can refer to this list.

Plenty Of Audience Targeting Options

The Google Display Network is known for its many different audiences targeting options. Lightbox ads are able to use every single one, which means you can really find the right audiences with this format type.

You can target by interests, keywords, demographics, affinity audiences, remarketing data and much more!

Better Performance Over Time

Once you’ve decided on the perfect recipe of audience targeting options, your lightbox ads fine-tune your selection over time. Using Google’s intelligence optimization engine, the ads pay attention to each unique audience member that interacts with the ad content and learns which methods and strategies are most effective and to which type of viewer.

Then, it makes small adjustments to improve audience engagement metrics more and more each time.

Repurpose Existing Content In A New, Engaging Format

Creating new ad or content assets can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Successful marketers excel at repurposing existing content and repackaging it in interesting new ways. Luckily, with Lightbox ads, this is very easy to do!

You can create ultra-engaging ad experiences from existing content elements, like images, YouTube Videos, Google Maps listings, shopping ads, website content and more. The lightbox experience automatically gives new life to past content pieces!

Automatically Resizes

One of the biggest challenges affecting marketers today is ensuring that content displays perfectly on both mobile and desktop devices. With more people searching on mobile devices, content, ads and websites absolutely have to work perfectly on these smaller screens. However, you can’t abandon desktop searches entirely.

With lightbox ads, sizing and device type are no concerns. The ad will adapt to any site, screen or device, even across mobile and desktop. And, this GDN ad type automatically resizes to fit all of the typical online ad spaces. Whether the site uses a skyscraper ad, large rectangle, leaderboard or portrait (or any other standard IAB type), your lightbox ad will adapt to display correctly.

Memorable Experience

With consumers seeing and engaging with hundreds of marketing messages a day, standing out from all the noise can feel impossible at times. However, the task of being noticed is a little easier when you create an immersive and memorable experience, which is the benefit of using a lightbox ad that was mentioned earlier.

When you effectively weave together images, video content, audio, and other interactive and stimulating elements, you can produce a Display Network ad that has a lasting impact on viewers.

Limit Disruptions

Ads have a natural tendency to be disruptive or annoying to users that just want to browse the Internet in peace. It’s the whole reason that consumers skip through commercials on their TV or install ad blockers on their computers.

Lightbox ads aim to reduce this disruption. By asking that users click or hover over the ad for a couple of seconds, they reduce the chance of accidental expansions that interrupt the user’s browsing.

Improve Your Customer Experience

Lightbox ads improve customer experience by providing a robust ad format type. By giving customers the option to select between different videos, images or other content elements, you give people the option to choose which content speaks to them.

Sony, for example, uses lightbox ads to notify audiences about a number of different products, from smartphones to 4K TVs, gaming consoles and more. Customers can choose which video, and which product, appeals to them most.

The choice is crucial in building an effective customer experience because it ensures that content is relevant to each and every person viewing your ad experience.

Bidding And Costs For Using Lightbox Ads

Convinced that lightbox ads are a smart choice for your business? Then, your next question, and everyone’s least favorite, is regarding cost.

Lightbox ads use the cost-per-engagement bidding strategy, instead of cost-per-thousand impressions. This means that while your bids may be higher, you will only pay that cost when a potential customer engages and views your ad experience. Thus, you’ll pay less in the long run.

Conclusions

Engagement, which is a benefit of using a lightbox ad, is a vital part of a successful ad. The immersive and adaptable experience that this Google Display Network ad type provides is a powerful advantage that should not be ignored.

Lightbox ads provide a lot of benefits to any business’ PPC strategies. And, you won’t have to break the bank with high costs when implementing lightbox ads!