Planning a Google AdWords Display Campaign requires five main stages, identification of goals, finding target audience, ad creation, budget and bid setting and understanding management tools and features. Careful planning of what you want to achieve, what your success metrics may be, and what message you want consumers to take away are all key to a successful display campaign. Also to consider are what your main benefits are, what your competitive edge is, who your target customers are, and what you are willing to pay to achieve it all.
Identifying goals is the first step to planning a display campaign. First you must determine if you need direct response traffic with extensive clicks or if you want to promote your brand and measure engagement. This will lead to either a cost per click (cpc) metric, or a cost per thousand impressions (cpm) metric. The next step is targeting goals, geographic targets, demographics and time of day. If you have any past data from previous marketing campaigns it can always be useful. How successful your campaign metrics need to be will play a role in the determination of targeting goals.
Locating potential customers throughout thousand of publisher websites can be difficult. There are several options available for targeting. You can target strictly by website content, using keywords to match your ads with placement websites contextually, this strategy is rather broad and may work better for branding than direct response. Selected sites for placements are referred to as “managed placements” and can be selected with the new display network placement tool or you can select the older “Find Placements” page which lists placements with data from the Google AdPlanner database and profile information on placements such as accepted ads, traffic statistics and similar sites. Advanced options and filters may be applied to limit targets based on location, language, devices and ad sizes.
Another method is to find users by interest category. This is the “topics” section of the display network tab, Categories can be broad or specific as the interests are categorized. Topics work best when associated with campaigns to generate additional traffic on a broad audience quickly or if you have an unrestricted budget. “Topics” also work with finding users in specific interest areas. The users are selected based on the types of sites they visit.
Campaigns can also be optimized by filters that restrict certain visitors from seeing ads. These filters are controlled in the display advertising tab and in the standard AdWords settings tab. In display, there is a gender option and an age option, different age groups and genders can be restricted. Location and time-of-day targeting are controlled in the main AdWords settings tab. Advanced targeting further restricts irrelevant content and sites, and lastly managing frequency of ad impressions focuses on more interested consumers.
The all new Google Display Ad Builder customizes rich media text ads by taking elements of design from your own website. Creating custom ads are no longer a problem when advertising on the Google Display Network. You can still use a graphic design program to artistically design your own banner ads, and you may still use standard AdWords text ads.
Display Campaigns are always more successful when not combined with search campaigns. Always keep the two separate and you will see more success with Ad Words Management.
