Display Advertising:
Leveraging Programmatic Google Ads for Brand Awareness and Conversions
Display Advertising is an image-based way of reaching consumers digitally, and displays your company on many websites, applications, and Google platforms (such as YouTube, Gmail, etc.) by using banners, images, video, and other forms of interactive media. Search ads target people searching for products or services; display ads build awareness and visibility for brands throughout the consumer experience and engage with customers who are browsing websites, watching videos, checking email, etc. Google's Display Network allows businesses to place their brand in front of large-scale targeted audiences around the world with a reach of over 90% of all Internet users.
Understanding the Google Display Network
Google’s Display Network is a massive network of nearly 2M websites, videos & Apps where you can show your display Ads. It has a huge presence, including big names such as YouTube, Gmail, Google Finance plus thousands of other smaller partners across almost all industries & interests. The sheer size & diversity of the Display Network makes it one of the best tools for increasing brand recognition, exposing your brand to new consumers, & maintaining visibility during longer periods of consumer evaluation of a product/service.
In contrast to how search Ads work – by focusing on user intent via keyword matching and displaying only when a user is actively looking for a solution, Display Ads are focused on audiences and what is likely to resonate with them regarding their interests, demographics, behavior and context, and therefore are shown as the user consumes content. Because of this difference in approach, Display Advertising is better suited to introduce your brand to potential customers that have no idea they want your product or service yet, and then nurture those interested over time through continuous re-exposure to your brand message.
Programmatic Advertising uses algorithms and real-time bidding to automate the process of buying and placing display Ads. Instead of manual negotiation and purchase of ad inventory, Programmatic Advertising allows you to evaluate and bid on millions of potential impression opportunities per second, identifying which ones meet your targeting specifications and adjusting bids to optimize spend for the most valuable impression opportunities.
Targeting Options for Display
Campaigns
Display network is a Google tool allowing advertisers to target very specific groups of users with great accuracy. Users can be segmented by demographics (age, sex, if you have kids, etc.) and also household income. A good way to begin to understand who your ideal user is; however, the more you use this method in combination with other targeting methods, the more specific your audience will become which will lead to more qualified leads and conversions from your ad campaign.
There are two types of Affinity Audiences; first are people who have long term interest in a particular category (sports fans, cooking enthusiasts, business owners) and secondly; In-Market Audiences, which are people who are looking at or comparing products in a particular category. The key difference between the two, is that In-Market Audiences have made it clear, through their online behavior, that they are much closer to purchasing something. Thus, they would make excellent choices to focus on in conversion-focused ad campaigns.
Custom Intent Audiences allow you to segment an audience based on keywords that users have searched for or websites that they have visited based on your products. Custom Intent Audiences help to bridge the gap between search and display advertising. Targeting users who have shown interest through their search history but are not actively searching, is a new level of relevance that you can add to your ad campaigns.
One of the most powerful tools in display advertising is Remarketing. Remarketing allows you to target users who have visited your website, used your mobile app, or viewed your YouTube video. Because users who you are remarketing to have shown some level of interest in your brand before, they tend to have a higher conversion rate than users who you are targeting for the first time.
Contextual targeting is another feature of display advertising. Contextual targeting places your ads on websites and pages based on specific topics, keywords, or content themes. For example, if you sell camping equipment, contextual targeting could place your ads on outdoor adventure blogs, hiking forums, and wilderness survival guides. This way your ads are placed in areas of high relevance and value to your users.
Creating Effective
Display Ads
Display Ad Performance is greatly impacted by Visual Design Quality. The ability to create a professional, visually appealing ad creates disruption in a cluttered digital landscape where each user will see over 200 ads on average per day. Your display ads should represent your brand through consistent color schemes, font styles, and other visual elements while at the same time being visually stimulating enough to break up the users' scrolling/browsing habits.
Responsive Display Ads automatically adjust to fit into the space that is available to them within the Display Network, allowing you to show different variations of the headlines, description, image(s) and logo(s) you have uploaded. Google utilizes Machine Learning to test different combinations of the headline, description, image(s) and logo(s) you provide to determine which combination(s) produce the highest performing ads for different placements and audiences. Providing multiple creative assets (images, headlines and descriptions) allows the system to have greater flexibility with its optimization.
Creating Image Ads requires you to create the ad units in a variety of pre-determined sizes, giving you full creative control, however also requiring additional design resources. Some common display ad unit sizes are the Leaderboard (728x90), Medium Rectangle (300x250), Wide Skyscraper (160x600), and Large Mobile Banner (320x100). Ensuring you create ads in a variety of sizes, will allow your campaign to compete for inventory across all possible placements.
Your call-to-action must be clear and compelling and should lead users towards the action(s) you would like them to take. For example, whether it is to "Shop Now", "Learn More", "Get A Quote", or "Download Our App" the CTA should be unambiguous and clearly tell the user what their next step should be. If you want to use urgency or incentives to encourage immediate action (i.e., limited-time offer or exclusive deal), then make sure you are doing so in your CTA.
Frequency
Management
"Frequency Capping (also known as "Impression Frequency") is a form of ad frequency control where an advertiser specifies the number of times their ads are displayed to a single user over a certain period of time. While frequency capping serves the purpose of increasing frequency and reinforcing brand awareness, over-frequency can be annoying to the end-user and wasteful of the advertisers' advertising budgets. The best practice is to use frequency capping as a tool to find that delicate balance between maximum visibility for your ads and maximum positive user experience. Typical settings for prospecting campaigns include setting the frequency cap at three or four (or sometimes up to five) impressions per user per day.
For remarketing campaigns, due to the fact that the users in this audience segment have previously shown an interest in your product or service, it is reasonable to set the frequency cap slightly higher than you would for a prospecting campaign. Nevertheless, even when targeting warm audiences, over-exposing them to ads can create negative perceptions of your brand and ultimately reduce the likelihood of converting them into customers."
Bidding &
Budget
Considerations
Because users are not searching for products or services, display advertising is generally a cheaper option per click compared to search advertising. The low cost per click associated with display advertising enables advertisers to achieve more impressions and larger audiences at the same budget as search advertising. As such, display conversions are normally much lower than search conversions, and advertisers will need to be diligent in optimizing their campaigns to maintain a positive return on investment.
CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (cost per click), Target CPA (target cost per acquisition), and Maximize Conversions bidding options can be used depending on the objective of an advertiser's campaign. Advertisers that want to increase brand awareness use CPM bidding and are looking for the highest possible number of impressions. Advertisers who want to drive traffic to their websites through clicks on ads use CPC bidding. When advertisers have sufficient conversion data available, they may also use Target CPA or Maximize Conversions bidding to optimize toward actual conversion events.
Advertisers should start with small test budgets to allow for collection of performance data before increasing their spending. Since display advertising requires a certain level of impression volume for Google’s algorithms to optimize properly, rushing into large budgets without collecting some data first can result in wasted money. During the initial testing phase, advertisers should monitor performance and make adjustments to targeting, ad creative, and bid pricing if necessary based on early performance data.
Measuring Display
Campaign Performance
Unlike Search Campaigns, Display Advertising Metrics need to be judged on a completely different scale of Success (or failure). Typically, click through rates for Display Ads are much lower (usually 0.1% to .5%) compared to Search Ads, which usually have CTR’s above 2%. Instead of simply looking at the CTR for your Display Campaign, you can use View Through Conversions. This will measure how many conversions come from people that viewed your ad but did not immediately click.
Evaluate your Display Campaign metrics by the campaign objective(s) you are trying to achieve. For example, if you are doing an awareness campaign then you would want to judge it off of metrics such as Reach, Impression Share, and Brand Lift Studies as opposed to immediate conversion metrics. If you are doing a consideration campaign then you may want to evaluate the campaign on Engagement metrics such as Time On Site and Pages Per Session, along with Assisted Conversions. If you are doing a direct conversion campaign, then you would want to judge it on Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), similar to a Search Campaign.
Google Analytics provides insight to how Display Traffic behaves when it lands on your website compared to all other channels. Evaluate your Display Traffic against Bounce Rates, Session Duration, and Conversion Paths to determine the value that Display Advertising is bringing to your entire Marketing Ecosystem. Attribution Modeling can help to reveal how Display Ads are influencing conversions that were previously attributed to another channel, thus revealing the true value of Display Advertising.
Optimizing Display
Campaigns
Continuous optimization is a way to keep your campaigns running efficiently, improving their overall performance over time. To continuously optimize, you need to regularly review your placements to see where your ads are showing up (excluding low quality websites that have high click-through rates but no conversion rate, as well as websites that do not align with your brand). Additionally, use negative keywords in contextual targeting campaigns to avoid having your ads show up on irrelevant content.
To continually optimize, test different creative variations to determine what images, messages and calls-to-actions resonate best with your target audiences. A/B testing should not only include visual elements, but also test different value propositions, promotional offers, and different targeting options. Be sure to let your tests run long enough to get sufficient data so you can make informed decisions.
Based on your performance data, continually refine your targeting of your audiences. If certain demographic segments or interest categories are consistently performing better than others, then increase your budget for those audiences and pause the underperforming ones. Use layers of targeting methods (demographics, interests, behaviors) to create highly targeted audience groups.
Conclusion
With Google’s programmatic platform, you can use display ads to reach your audience with precision and efficiency and increase both brand awareness and conversions at every stage of your customer’s path-to-purchase. The success of your display ad campaign will depend on how well you are able to combine and optimize multiple tools such as advanced targeting capabilities, visually appealing creative elements and analytical reporting and tracking to enable you to support and enhance your search advertising and overall digital marketing strategy. Additionally, it is crucial to understand that most of the time, display advertising will be one component of a larger multi-step process that contributes to conversion by raising awareness and providing long-term visibility to potential customers who may ultimately convert after several interactions.