Google Ads DISPLAY Campaign Setup - Full Tutorial

Key Takeaways

in this video we're going to discuss one of the most slept on campaign Types on Google ads display campaigns many advertisers struggle to make display campaigns profitable Beyond basic retargeting so in this video I will guide you through how to set up a effective Google display campaigns and make them work even for cold audiences display ads are really different from search ads which is what most beginner advertisers are most familiar with when you advertise on the search Network you're using key were targeting to reach people who are actively looking for something often these people are ready to buy in contrast on the Display Network while you can use available targeting options to reach your potential customers they're probably not shopping for anything they might not be ready to make a purchase from you right now and probably they' have never heard of your brand before so in this way display ads are more similar to social media ads than to search ads because display users are typically not in the buying mode when they see your ads that's why display ads are often used for retargeting specifically because once someone has already interacted with your brand you can stay top of mind and give them extra push to convert them to a sale or a lead whether it is offering a discount code or emphasizing urgency and scarcity you can close a lot of sales or leads this way however there are a couple of serious advantages to using Display Network first the the Display Network covers most of the internet and reaches about 3 million sites worldwide second most advertisers misunderstand and underutilize the Display Network as a result display ads allow you to reach your potential customers much cheaper than on a search Network another similarity between display and social media ads is that display is an extremely visual ad format I'm sure you've seen those banners and image-based ads across various websites like news sites or blogs those are the display ads while they primarily revolve around images display ads also use videos and some simpler text based formats it goes without saying that your images should be high quality and aesthetically pleasing and most importantly they need to be able to grab attention of casual web browsers who are not currently shopping also of course your ad needs to be super clear in terms of exactly what you're offering or selling or people won't understand what your ad is about and it will just go over their head so make sure to get your creative right I will make a separate video on how to design amazing display at creatives make sure to subscribe to the channel if you don't want to miss that upcoming video also I've made a list of my 10 top performing headlines on Google ads that you will be able to use for your display campaigns as well you can download the list for free at the link in my bio on my Instagram or my X page at Google ads nerd okay we discussed that it's pretty easy to make display work for retargeting but how do you make it work for new cold audiences well try to think about it by putting yourself in the shoes of your potential customer who have never heard about you and are just browsing the web how do you make them take action when they see your ad from my experience your display ad needs to have some sort of wow factor either through a great offer or highlighting a key value proposition ideally something that only you can offer and people can get nowhere else this is because one of the best ways to spark and hold someone's attention is by offering them something really compelling maybe it's a promotion a bundle or simply an attractive price if someone sees an ad with a great deal it makes them feel like they cannot afford to miss out on this if you're not running a specific promotion you can still emphasize your value proposition or something that sets you apart from your competitors for instance if you're a SAS company and you offer more team seats for a lower price than your competitors that is something to highlight in your ad if you're a lawyer you could use a selling point like you don't pay unless we win uh to grab people's attention and clearly and concisely communicate your competitive Advantage all right now that we've covered the basics let's dive into how to set up a display campaign on Google ads so here I have a Google ads account open to create a campaign click this big beautiful create button at the top left or go to campaigns and click this blue create button and click new campaign under your campaign objective choose whatever makes sense for your goals I'm going to select sales uh if you're collecting leads you can select leads under your convers goals choose your goal for sales typically you're going to select your purchase event then click continue under campaign type select display then add your website URL here for the purposes of this tutorial I'm just going to add a random URL then click continue under campaign name enter your campaign name I strongly recommend you to use a proper naming convention so you can easily find and manage your campaigns so here I'll name this campaign display test campaign then click continue under your locations choose the country state or city you want to Target uh under location options make sure to select presence option people in or regularly in your included locations because otherwise by default the set is own presence or interest which means that it will show ads to people who don't leave or are regularly in your targeted location but also people who have shown interest in your included location so make sure to select presents unless you have a business reason to uh choose a presentence or interest but in most cases I recommend present under languag is choose the language that your customers speak I'm going to keep English then you have more setting options under add rotation I recommend leaving it under optimize prefer best performing ads under ad schedule I recommend leaving it under all day unless you have a specific business reason to advertise only on specific days or specific times of day under devices you can select all devices or you can select specific devices usually I keep it on all devices a compaign URL options you can leave unchanged then under Dynamic ads you can add your feed so if you have a merchant center connected and if you have your feed set up you can connect your feed here so I'm going to select a feed and once you select your feed you're also able to apply certain product filters to your feed so if you want to show show only specific products from your feed go select filter and here you're able to select uh different filtering options uh you can filter by product type brand grouping condition and uh your feed labels but in this example I am not going to apply any product filters and you can also choose your campaign start and end dates personally I never set an end date I always have it running without an end date but if it makes sense for your campaign do it personally I don't and then finally you're also able to apply some content exclusions meaning that you can prevent your ads from showing on certain content content like content for teens or mature audiences some sensitive content like for example when there is profanity or when something sens uh Sensational or shocking is happening in the content can also exclude some certain content types like live streaming embedded videos below the fold Park domains etc etc so in my opinion this is really a business decision that you need to make from Google ads perspective I wouldn't recommend excluding any of those placements unless you've tested them specifically and you have identified that that certain types of placements don't work for you or if your brand is such that you don't want to be associated with a certain types of content you can also do it but personally unless there is no business reason or there is no branding reason to do any of these content exclusions I prefer to allow Google ads uh to optimize and for its machine learning to identify the best content for the businesses that I'm managing so once you've selected your exclusions you can click next next you need to set your average daily budget for this campaign in this case I'm going to set it to 50 per day under bidding you need to select your bidding strategy I recently made a video about beating strategies where I went through all beating strategies on Google ads and when to use them properly so if you're not sure about what busing strategy is right for you I recommend you watch that video for this case I'm going to optimize for conversion value and I'm not going to set a Target return on N spend in the beginning I prefer first allowing the campaign to run for for at least a month ideally maybe 2 months and then based on the data that I have received I would set my target Ros but for for now I'll leave it just optimizing for conversion value then click next here you need to set your targeting by default Google ads is going to set optimized uh targeting for you which essentially means that Google ads is going to use information from your landing pages and your assets to set up targeting for you you can click learn more here to see exactly how optimized targeting works but in the beginning I recommend you not use optimized targeting and actually set up the targeting options so that you can give Google a little bit of a direction in terms of where Google should look for your ideal customers and that can speed up your optimization a little bit in the beginning so first you have audience segments here you're able to Define audience segments based on some targeting options like their demographics their interests and habits what people are actively searching for or planning how people have interacted with your business or any combined audience segments and your custom audience segments so here in search you can try different keywords that are related to your product and see exactly what targeting segments Google has available for you when it comes to demographics I rarely touch this unless there is a reason for me to Target just married people or just parents or certain education level and so on primarily when I use segments I Target with interests and Affinity segments and I also like using in market and life events also really useful and finally if you have a retargeting audience or if you are setting up this campaign specifically for retargeting you can select your website visitors or maybe your old purchases your card abandoners and depending on your strategy so in this case I will just select a few options just for the sake of of this example and now that we've selected some targeting options now you have an option to opt out from optimized targeting so you can uncheck it here additional target options that you have is demographics if you want to reach People based on their gender their age their parental St status or their household income note that household income targeting is only available in select countries personally I rarely touch demographics as I prefer allowing Google to find the best demograph graphics for me another targeting option you have is content targeting by keywords here you're able to select some terms that are related to your product or service to Target relevant websites apps and videos so if you have some data from your search campaigns uh you can add keywords that convert for you that drive a lot of traffic for you that you think are your Top Value keywords you can add them here you're also can see some suggestions from Google here for you based on your relevance and by clicking a plus sign here you can add some keywords for you under keyword setting you're able to decide how keywords in this ad group will be used to Target your ads you have an audience option which lets you target ads to People based on their interests or sites they visit but Google ads may also use the data from your audience sources to improve the in and targeting of your audience campaigns and our content uh it allows to show your ads on web pages apps and videos that are directly related to your keywords and Google will not be trying to improve or optimize your targeting and go beyond it therefore this option May significantly narrow your reach but in the beginning when you're just starting out it's okay to be a little a bit more narrow because you're trying to give Google the best Direction possible to find your ideal customers and once you've started Gathering conversion data once uh Google found your ideal customer then you can let Google optimize and go beyond your audience and try to find some customers outside of your targeting so in the beginning I recommend you select content here you're also able to Target by certain topics which allows you to Target many web pages apps and videos about a certain subject so here you can use again the search function to try some keywords and find if you can find a topic that is related to your product this option is a little bit broader than keyword targeting but I still think that it's useful so if you're able to find a topic that is highly relevant to your product or service I recommend you also give Google a topic or two uh to Target and then finally you can also uh choose a specific placements for your targeting or more specifically websites videos or apps where you would like your ads to show this is probably the narrowest targeting option that you can choose by default your ads will be shown on different websites and apps apps and videos that match all the targeting options that we've already chosen but here you're able to select a specific website specific YouTube channel specific app or app category so for example if you wanted um your ads to show on the website like Daily Mail For example you can search for this keyword and see what websites would match your search for so for example if I choose this my ads would just show on this website but in the beginning unless it's a part of your strategy just to Target specific website specific Channel specific videoos specific apps I recommend leaving this option Broad and not set any specific placements but it's still interesting to test and see maybe slightly different approaches to different types of app categories or different types of websites but personally I found that in the beginning it's best to leave this Broad and then as you allow your campaign to run you can check exactly where your ads have been appearing and then you can try to narrow by specific placements for now I'm just going to leave it broad make sure that you have views optimized targeting unchecked and click next next you need to create your ads so first enter your final URL if you've entered that in the beginning it will be automatically populated for you enter your business name for this example I'm just going to use a random name under images you can add up to 15 uh different images or you can try to generate images with Google AI I've tried this feature and it works pretty good but images of people and faces aren't supported yet what you need to do is describe the kind of image you want and you can also even select your aspect ratio and and add some reference images but for this example I'm going to just select a few of my old images that I've used in the past not necessarily related to this example but still just for the purposes of the tutorial then you need to add up to five logos I recommend adding a square logo and the landscape logo and by the way you can hover over this little question and see the guidelines for different types of content like for images for Logos next you need to add videos here you need to make sure that you have your YouTube channel linked with your Google ads account and you can enter your YouTube url here to add a video or if you added any videos to your campaigns in the past there will be saved here in your asset Library so I'm going to select a couple of videos here next you can add up to five headlines and here if you click more ideas you can get some suggestions from Google I highly recommend that you first enter all five headlines I often see among uh different Google ads advertisers that they don't use all available headlines and descript itions and if you're doing that you're shooting yourself in the foot uh as giving Google more assets to work with usually increases its chances of finding the right asset combination finding the right combination of an image with a headline with a description or a video if you're just adding a minimum amount of headlines and descriptions then you are not giving Google as much to work with as you could so here I'll just enter a few sample headlines but if you're struggling but if you're looking for assistance with your headlines I highly recommend you download my top 10 top converting headlines on Google ads it's free and I think it will be really helpful for you and it will increase the click-through rate of your ads you can download the list at my Linkin bio on my Instagram or my X account at Google ads nerd for now I'll just use some sample headlines next you're able to add one long headline this headline will show when there is enough space for it to show it will be usually shown by itself without a description so keep it in mind of when writing your long headline and finally you're able to add up to five descriptions again I recommend you using all available description options I will just copy paste some descriptions that I've done in advance so I'm done with the descriptions here at the top you have your ad strength and as you can see Google is saying that I need to add more images to increase my chances for better performance as I added just a few so I will just quickly go ahead and select some additional images so you can see that once I give Google more images to work with it's going to update my ad strength to excellent and this is usually what you want to see however don't let it discourage you if you see an ad strength that that is not excellent because not everything that Google says is good is necessarily best for you but usually as a rule of thumb giving Google more assets to work with is usually good so once your ad is completely set up you're also able to select a few more options first you have additional format options here you're able to use asset enhancements use autogenerated video that Google is going to make from your headlines your descriptions and your images and you're also able to use native formats meaning that it's going to add some colors or some format based on the placement where you're advertising I highly recommend you leaving all those on then under URL options you can leave this unchanged and under more options you're also able to select custom call to action text like for example you can select shop now you can select get quote see more subscribe install apply now personally I prefer leaving it automated and you're also able to select custom colors for your ad specifically your main color and your accent color but if you've selected native formats here you're also going to have some native color options selected here and I also recommend you sticking uh to this option so now that we're done you can click next and our campaign is almost done and now this is a review stage you can quickly check all the settings that you've done for this campaign I recommend that you rename your ad group to follow your naming convention whatever it is I will use something like this for the purposes of this example and once you're happy with all your settings and and you reviewed your campaign you can click publish and just like that your campaign is ready I hope you found this video helpful please subscribe to the channel for more valuable videos on Google ads and I will see you in the next one