Display Campaigns Expert Tips from an AdWords Consultant
The display network covers over 2 million websites across Google’s partner websites, videos and apps.For those who have never run a display ad before, this often seems intimidating. But with proper guidance, these campaigns can be highly profitable. It can be challenging to conquer without the help of a Google Adwords consultant or agency, but I will provide some insider tips here.
I will go over a few of the techniques we use as Google Adwords consultants to make sure display ads work for you. I’ll cover the basics of the display network and strategies we use as a Google Adwords agency.
Display Campaign Types used by Google Adwords Management Services
Smart Display
To start, you always have the option for a Smart Display campaign. This type of campaign will give total control to Google. Although it may sound scary giving control to Google’s machine learning algorithm, it is effective for some accounts. These accounts tend to have larger budgets, accurate tracking, and conversions with value. These factors will give Google room to learn and optimize based on your target ROAS or CPA. But if you are looking to have the most control over your placement’s (where your ad shows), this is not the campaign type for you.
Audience Based Targeting
Our favorite Google Adwords display strategy is leveraging Google’s audiences.The best bet for most accounts is remarketing. You can use Google Analytics or the audience section of Google Adwords to create audience’s for visitors of your website.Most Google Adwords consultants stick with audiences of around 30 days, but this doesn’t mean other timeframes can’t be profitable. Create ads specifically targeting this audience and Google will show them your ad to partner sites across the web.
The next method using audiences is to use those that Google has already created. These are called“in-market” audiences or “affinity audiences. If there is a prefilled audience that is relevant for your product, these can be great to start running ads with. But please take into account the size of the audience. Some of these run up to billions of impressions per month and can get quite expensive if not monitored properly. It’s best to start with remarketing first unless you are a Google Adwords consultant or using a Google Adwords management service.
Keyword Targeting
Another common method is to use keywords. This allows you to select keywords to target with your campaigns and ad groups. If you are used to the keywords in search campaigns these function a little differently. These keywords will match your keywords to related content and audiences. Keep in mind, Google has been slowly phasing this out in favor of the audience-based techniques.
Placement Targeting
Lastly, if you are willing to put in the legwork, you can opt for manual placements. This requires searching on Google for websites relevant to your product or service. Then adding these as placements to your campaign.. But keep in mind they must be partnered with google and actively showing ads on their website. This is the extra work that a Google Adwords management service will provide. As digging through all the related websites and finding which ones are relevant, can be a daunting task on your own.
Next Steps from an Google Adwords Consultant
It is important to continually monitor your placements. Review this daily or weekly just like you would for a search terms report. Then exclude any placements that you do not want to show up for. Again, these are the daily checks where a Google Adwords consultant will provide the extra value.
Display campaigns can be a little more challenging than search campaigns, and not quite as intuitive to run. But following these strategies, you can set up profitable display campaigns for your business.