Google Display Advertising: Google Display Campaign Optimisation for Maximising Performance

The Google display network has a reach of 90% of all internet users and is the world’s largest online display advertising network, expanded across two million sites. This network refers to a large number of websites and apps where advertisers are able to promote their business’ products and services.

Google display network ads are creative ads usually in the form of images or videos that will take users through to an advertiser’s website when clicked on. As Google display ads are typically presented to online users as they are browsing sites, rather than when they are conducting a search, display campaigns are often used more for building brand awareness compared to generating results or maximising conversions.

Advertising on the Google display network has its pitfalls, with display campaigns often achieving lower click-through rates and quality of traffic compared to search. Although display advertising is sometimes seen by advertisers as a risky strategy, an expertly implemented and well-executed display campaign can prove beneficial for online advertisers.

Whilst there is a risk for display campaigns to rack up a lot of clicks quickly, cost per click for display campaigns are generally lower than that of search campaigns (30% on average). Display advertising also allows marketers to advertise with a much larger reach and make their business visible online to a vast quantity of online users, and therefore achieve considerable increases in site traffic.

With a well-targeted display campaign, advertisers have the ability to reach out to new customers and grow their customer base, by appearing with creative and engaging visual ads on relevant sites to audiences with the highest potential of converting.

Targeting and making yourself visible to the right audiences is the ultimate key to creating an effective display campaign, and one of the best ways of achieving this is through re-marketing. This involves advertising to online users who have previously visited and engaged with your website, and this method often generates the best results as you are marketing to users who have previously converted or considered converting on your website. You can also invest differently on audiences based on levels of engagement with your site e.g. spend less on homepage viewers and more on users who abandoned shopping cart/checkout pages. It’s worth noting that this is less effective in reaching new potential customers due to targeting users who have already visited your site and are familiar with your brand.

Another way to optimise your display campaigns for ensuring that you are visible to the most relevant users online is by managing specific sites where your ads appear, or equally, identifying sites that you don’t want to advertise on. This allows marketers to ensure that they are not wasting their budget paying for clicks from irrelevant sites and driving poor quality traffic to their own site. The “where ads showed” report is a useful tool for identifying irrelevant websites that your ads have shown on and can be used when applying placement exclusions to refine the targeting of your display campaign.

As with any type of campaign, properly implemented conversion tracking is vital for monitoring the performance of your display advertising and reviewing how well it is meeting your marketing objectives. Doing this can be more difficult with display campaigns as they typically generate fewer conversions with ads targeted to users earlier on in the purchase funnel. This is why using the right attribution model is important for display, as applying a more accurate attribution model will take into consideration all touch points of the customer’s journey prior to conversion, and will not simply attribute it to the last click.

If you are considering incorporating Google display advertising into your marketing strategy and need assistance, or if you are in need of advice or a professional audit from our experts then contact us today. Additionally, feel free to read our blog for further digital insights.