Creating advantageous display campaigns in Google AdWords

Posted on Monday, 6. March 2017 in category Google Advertising. 3 min read • Written by

Ivelina Manova

Have you tried advertising campaigns in the Display network? Did you receive fewer conversions, lower CTR, and less revenue in comparison to your Search campaigns? Well, this is not a surprise to me and yet I would like to share some of my ideas how to improve your overall effectiveness.

Plan your actions

What comes first is to define our target audience and build the strategy how to reach them at the right moment and proper context. Setting up your KPIs and milestones across the timeline of your campaign is crucial to the success of your activities. When you look at the consumer journey display campaigns are located in the awareness stage. Do have this in mind when you build your key message and target your audience?

If your website is not a brand new, my best case scenario is to start working with what I already have instead of entering into the vast display network. Creating remarketing lists and developing similar audience based on their behavior with your website visitors can limit your exposure and make your targeting much more efficient. Those are the people closest to the clients you already have, and it would be much easier and cost effective to narrow your visibility towards them.

screen-shot-2017-02-24-at-2-38-54-pm

 

Saying “NO.”

During the planning stage we define our target audience, but also we can identify what kind of content, interests or people are not.

In most of the cases, we need to set site category exclusions or even negative remarketing audiences like converted users (depending on the business type). Also, we can exclude mobile apps before we have even started, or add negative campaign lists with placements from previous experiments.

screen-shot-2017-02-24-at-2-42-11-pm

Negative audience exclusions and site category options on campaign level

 

screen-shot-2017-02-24-at-2-42-30-pm

Negative placement exclusion lists in Shared Library

Monitoring and fine tuning

 you would like to have more regular optimizations to your campaign and measure effectiveness. Just like your search campaigns your display activities require time to grow and become profitable. Do not let the mobile apps take over your ad budget. Ifbile app traffic, then build a separate campaign or ad group and validate before you invest further. Always test and verify effectiveness with a significant amount of data. Regularly I test up to 5 types of targeting methods separately for few days until I can come up with a decision on how to continue with optimization. You can target users contextually based on the content they are reading, by interests, you can narrow even further with location and demographic segmentation, or you can even use Gmail Sponsored Promotion to show your product and service to users who have already received an email from your competitor’s domain. There are many approaches but what is vital is how you execute and measure your KPIs. View-through conversions in AdWords and impression assisted revenue in Google Analytics are my must haves in the optimization process.

screen-shot-2017-02-24-at-2-45-58-pm

Impression assisted revenue in Google Analytics – Multi-channel funnels – assisted conversions

Creative matters

Your banner is your message to the world. My recommendation is to prepare users with an accurate information what to expect when they click and navigate to your landing page. In most of the cases, the truth does segment audience at the moment they see it which will save you budget. Using all available ad sizes including responsive ads will guarantee you better reach. More about creating effective display ads for performance networks I will share in my lecture for InOrbit conference on the 9th March.

My last recommendation is to try and test new things. If you cannot change your target audience and your product or service, then you can change your approach and message to them. The best thing about digital is that it is highly measurable and you can make data-driven decisions.

 

Don't miss our next blog post!
Subscribe to Red Orbit's newsletter and get notified about all new blog posts!
Still here?
Question? Write it in the comment bellow, let's open a debate.

One response to “Creating advantageous display campaigns in Google AdWords”

  1. As I expected, search engine is getting more humanize. Google is deilfnteiy on the way. And using content driven marketing strategy does help a lot which is I am using. To use high quality content to draw natural and genuine links, to get real readers, to position myself as an expert. By following these 23 questions, we can generate even more quality articles. 🙂

Leave a Reply