There are three key components to creating a successful Google display ads campaign. These components are ensuring you have the right campaign settings, have proper ad group targeting and effective ad creative. Ensuring you take the time to set up these components specific to your business and the goals of your campaign should result in a successful display ads campaign.
Display Ad Campaign Settings
In order to make your AdWords campaign a display ad campaign make sure you select the Display option under the campaign type. One of the first settings you will need to configure is the locations you want your display ads shown, you can do this by country, province, city or even with radius targeting. Being specific with your location targeting is important as you only want to display your ads to users who are likely to visit your website or convert with your business. Radius targeting is often a great way to target users in relation to your business location. If you are a car dealership in southwest Edmonton you can target users within a 15km radius of your location, this ensures you target the users who are most likely to visit your location.
The next important setting you will encounter in your campaign settings is the bidding settings. Prior to configuring your bidding settings it is important to know what your business hopes to achieve with your display ad campaign. You need to know if the goal of your campaign is to create brand awareness, bring traffic to your website or complete a specific conversion.
Once you identify which type of interaction you want from your users you can set your bidding settings to accommodate this.
- If you are creating a brand awareness campaign you should set your bidding focus to viewable impressions
- If you are creating a campaign to generate traffic to your website then you should set your bidding focus to clicks
- If you are creating a campaign to generate leads or online sales then you should set your bidding focus to conversions.
Letting Google automatically set your bids to maximize for your goal is a good option to use when you’re just getting started.
Ad Group Targeting
With Google display ad campaigns you are able to target audiences and demographics. Audience targeting is more focused on hobbies and interests while demographic targeting is more focused around age and gender.
When configuring your audience targeting there are 3 different audiences you can choose from. Knowing exactly what type of user you want to display your ads to is important when setting up both audience and demographic targeting.
Affinity audiences: target users based on their hobbies or interests. You can choose from a number of different interest categories such as beauty & wellness, food & dining, sports & fitness and more. Each of these interest categories breakdown to even more specific interests within those categories. This allows you to set broad audience targeting or very specific audience targeting.
In-market audiences: target users based on your business category. Finding your business category and categories related to your business will target your ads to users interested in these products or services. Just like affinity audiences you can select broad categories or drill down to very specific categories.
Remarketing audiences: show ads to users who have previously visited your site. Creating a remarketing campaign will require additional set up on your own website. This is a great way of keeping your business in the front of a previous users mind.
Demographics
Demographic targeting is very straight forward as you can set your ads to target users based on their age range, gender, parental status and household income. Having a strong understanding of which demographics are important to your business will have a significant impact on just how effective your display ads campaign is.
Creating Effective Ads
Google allows for 3 different display ad types these include text ads, static image ads and animated display ads.
Text Ads
Text ads are the easiest to create as you just simply enter the text you want shown in your display ads into AdWords. Text ads receive a wide reach as AdWords can fit text ads into many different sized placements and a wide number of sites. In order to create an effective text ad you need to provide engaging content that clearly relays the goal of your display campaign.
Static Image Ads
Static image ads need to be visually engaging and draw attention to the goal of your campaign. When done well image ads can have high click-through-rates and create a lot of engagement. Unfortunately image ads are limited in where they appear due to certain ad space size restrictions. Creating your image ads in a number of different dimensions will help improve the number of sites they will be shown on.
Animated Display Ads
Animated display ads utilize HTML5 to incorporate motion and interactivity within your ad. Animated display ads have the opportunity to be the most engaging and eye catching ad type. Ensuring you do not go overboard with the animations is key with animated ads. We all remember the age of the internet that was flooded with flashing ads, or ads with crazy amounts of animation. These types of ads are more likely to seem like spam to users. Using animation to draw attention without being distracting is key.
Get Some Help
Creating a truly effective Google AdWords display campaign requires knowledge and experience. At Konstruct Digital we have AdWord experts with years of experience building a wide variety of display ad campaigns. If your business needs help building your display ad campaign please get a hold of us.
