Google Ads Display Network Optimization Ideas

Key Takeaways

the Google Display Network is a great way to get your brand out in front of potential customers whether they are aware of you the remarketing campaigns or if they're not and you can Target them through all of the different targeting options available on the Google Display Network if you're interested in checking those out you can look at this video right here and there are lots of different ways that you can put together your ads to introduce yourself or remind people about your company if you're interested in Google ads responsive display ads which we highly recommend you can check out this video right here but what I want to talk about today is what happens after your campaigns have been running for a little while what optimizations can you make what levers should you be pulling what stats should you look at so today I want to talk about a handful of the optimizations that we like to make in our Google Display Network campaigns as we're going through each of the example optimizations and settings that I want to show you in this video I'm going to be using two live client accounts so there's going to be a decent amount of blurring but hopefully you'll still be able to get the gist of it anyway the first thing I want to talk about is a problem I run into with new display campaigns that are optimizing toward a conversion or performance goal because the entire account is it's a problem I run into a lot and it happened most recently with this gdn prospecting campaign so I'm going to choose just that one and I'm actually going to shift to the change history page you'll see here the first triangle is going to be on December 8th and that's where 36 changes were made and if we scroll down here you'll see that there are a few line items for December 8th that was this one where the campaign was created to start with it then had all of its ad groups created it had the targeting added and had all of the different ad images and data segments added to the campaigns effectively at this point the campaign was turned live and everything should have been up and running but the one thing that I started with which I would always like to start with is this bid strategy as maximize conversions we didn't have any Target CPA included we just wanted the campaign to maximize toward conversions so if I close this carrot come back up to the chart up here you'll see that we launched on December 8th and didn't get any traction on any of this until December 12th that's not very many days and you might normally leave things the way they were until you start to see performance ramp up but from previous experience I knew that because we had started with maximized conversions we're going to have a hard time getting off the ground so I came back here on on December 12th I made the change to maximize clicks as the bid type as opposed to maximized conversions since we're in the change history you can see that nothing else was done that day and these campaign parameters that started on December 18th were literally just campaign parameters but immediately on December 12th we started seeing clicks come through it's the only thing that changed this is the tracking changes and then all the way on January 3rd after in about a month of performance maybe a little less we changed the bid strategy back to maximize conversions and although the click volume and the click-through rate that you can see kind of all dropped because we're focusing on conversions rather than clicks we were able to retain the volume coming through it might be easier if I switch this to the week view yep so you can see that we started off with high clicks higher click-through rate which is the red line once I made the change in bidding strategy both of those things dropped but we retained traffic throughout if you start off a gdn campaign on maximize conversions and it doesn't get any traction try switching it to maximize clicks for a short period of time and then switching back to maximized conversions once it's got a little bit of volume under its belt Google insists that you shouldn't have to do this and yet this is just one of many real world examples that I run into where it ended up working out pretty well the second type of optimization and review that I want to walk you through is ADD variations there's a couple different ways we're going to do this because I don't have the perfect account for this example I'm going to use this other client account but I'm going to use ads across campaigns not within if you're getting nitpicky on me I know that it's not perfect but it's a good example so I'm going to head over to the ads and assets and click on ads the first thing to note when you're reviewing any sort of Google Display Network ad copy performance is that there are two categories of ads and we have a couple of them here you can see in the add type column we have image ads and we also have responsive display ads those assets are very different because image ads are going to be specific dimensions like 728 by 90 320 by 50 468 by 60 whereas responsive display ads are going to fit into any of the different shapes I already alluded to the responsive display ad video that we have in the intro this video so I'm not going to go further into that but when reviewing ad performance I want want you to always make sure that you know when you are comparing a responsive display ad versus an image ad so one of the different things that I will do for this is just use my filters I'll filter for add type and I'll check the box next to either responsive display ad or image ad depending on which I want to review and then I can compare them on the whole whether by looking down at the filtered ads which you can see here that have thirteen thousand dollars in spend which the total account in this instance which has 62 000 which isn't a perfect comparison but you can also compare the stats among the different ad formats so here this would be the easiest way for us to compare which responsive display ad is performing the best because they need to be compared to each other as opposed to compared across all different ad formats because again responsive display ads can show up anywhere whereas banner ads have their own specific area so here I would probably decide that the top two responsive display ads are performing relatively well and then I would probably want to do something to change or or remove these next three responsive display ads because they're just not doing very well but right now I'm only looking at the conversion performance there's also another stat around the click-through rate that I want to talk about that I don't think people pay as much attention to as you can see here this one has a 3.82 this is 2.7 and then Things fall off a cliff and we're at 0.32 0.51 0.23 but this is the overall click-through rate the number of total clicks divided by the total number of Impressions but the display network has a few nuances because of the way that the ads appear so I'm going to close the filter and now I'm going to go to columns and click modify and here I want to show you the viewability metrics we already have some of these as suggested columns down here on the side but one of the metrics I like to use is viewable CTR as you can see by the example here it represents how often people click your ad after it becomes viewable it might seem silly but an ad is only considered viewable when 50 of it shows on a web page for at least 1 one second so what that means is that a number of the times that your ad is populating on a page or generating an impression it's not actually viewable because you can't say 50 of it and it wasn't viewable for at least one second so one of the other suggested columns Google has is this viewable Impressions I'm gonna go ahead and add it and that is the number of times an ad was viewable and again fifty percent at least one second I'm going to move these to a better place in our column so we'll be able to see it better in the live example and just click apply now when we're looking at these same ads we can see that we have a little bit of a difference here the number of Impressions that a viewable are a bit less than those total so it's not too far off but you can see that the click-through rate is also a bit different there's not really any change in performance here we still see that the top one has the best by far the next one is the next one down and so on and so forth in the same order that they were before but you can see that the viewable click-through rate is quite a bit higher than the click-through rate overall so when you're reviewing your Display Network work ads I encourage you to look at viewable CTR for performance compared to other ads rather than click-through rate because what you want to know is how the users are engaging with your ads they can't engage with them or make a determination about if they like them if they don't actually see them so use viewable CTR instead of CTR overall for ad copy review on Display Network the one other caveat I want to talk about is four image ads so I'm going to change my filter here the same thing applies for click-through rate versus viewable click-through rate but I also want to caution you against saying that this top ad is better than the second ad because this top one has dimensions of 468 by 60. it only shows up in placements that fit that the second one is 320 by 50. what would be a better comparison is saying that this ad which is 320 by 50 is better comparable to another ad which is 320 by 50. so let me set up a filter for names real quick and now we can see all of the different ad creatives that are 320 by 50 compared to each other so we still see that this top one has click-through rate of 0.34 first 0.36 as a viewable CTR but this add variant down here further has a viewable CTR of 0.77 and the one down even a little bit more is 0.98 this I would categorize as better than this top one because it's being clicked on at almost three times the rate even though it's not being shown very often so whenever you're comparing your ad variants on the Google Display Network make sure that you're doing comparable across ad formats and within formats as well as within add sizes to get the best performing for that specific ad variant the next thing I want to talk about is expanded and optimized targeting and for that we're going to head to the audiences tab I'm going to go ahead and choose one of these campaigns and I chose this specific campaign because I know it is opted into expanded targeting but if you've been setting up your display campaigns or if somebody else set them up for you and you have opted into that Network which if you're interested in learning more about and expanded targeting you can review the video at the top of the screen right now but if you want to know how that's performing you just need to come to the audiences tab be in this audience segment section and then click show table and now down below we only have one competitor customer segment in this campaign but you can see that we have different line items for total segments and total expansion and optimized targeting so if we scroll over a little bit this table isn't super easy to view you can see here that our segments have generated 58 conversions for 124 dollar cost per lead whereas the targeting expansion and optimized targeting has generated six at a 363 dollar cost per lead the click-through rate is also bad and the cost per click is higher this in my mind is not a good idea so in this example I would suggest turning this off and to do that we would need to jump into the ad group itself jump into settings then click on ad group targeting and then all the way down at the bottom here you'll see optimize targeting that you can just uncheck the Box on and click save clearly Google doesn't really want you to do this because they hit it pretty well it's not just in any of the other settings but now you know how to do it for the last piece I want to talk about placements mobile apps and content controls because once your ads have been running for a while you need to make sure that they're showing up in safe places so the first thing to do is review the placements where your ads have shown and that's going to be in the content section under where ADS showed from here you'll easily be able to review the individual websites or mobile applications that your ads showed in so you can just review regular performance metrics for these and try and optimize what you want if you want to exclude a placement all you need to do is check the box next to it you can click edit and you can exclude from the ad group or for the campaign but if you notice like with this list of placements here a lot of them are mobile apps depending on whether you want your ads to show on mobile apps and how they're performing you can first set up a filter so let's just go for placement and see how mobile apps do overall these are pretty bad they have 1600 in spend zero conversions this does not make sense to me so I already showed you how to exclude individual placements which can be by checking the box but if you want to exclude wider swaths of content you can head over to the exclusions tab then you need to choose whether you want to exclude topics placements or keywords for this one I want to exclude placements click the pencil to add new ones exclude placements and now to exclude all mobile apps you just need to come down to app categories and you can check the box next to all of these different categories to exclude them and by checking the box next to all of these including all of the Google Play Pieces down here which is only the one you'll be able to exclude all mobile apps from your campaigns now it does take a little bit to go through and check all these boxes you can't just do it automatically in one box check but that's neither here nor there this is the way you exclude mobile apps from your gdn campaigns I'm not going to say this right now but let's say you don't want to exclude individual placements or apps as a category let's say that you noticed in that placements list that you were showing up alongside a lot of content that you really don't want to be next to so rather than taking care of that on this content tab you can actually run to the settings tab within your campaign click on additional settings and down here at the bottom you'll see content exclusions which will open up a little bit and this section allows you to opt out of showing your ads on content that doesn't fit your brand at the campaign level we have a video that Joe has put together that already covers all the different ways these content exclusions work whether it's from the campaign level or at the account level which you can see a handful of these are already excluded at the account level so I'm not going to go too far into it but just for sake of being able to see it here if you wanted to exclude all of your ads from being on parked domains or live streaming YouTube video or if you want to make sure that you're not alongside any of the sensitive content categories or just making sure that you're following only certain content labels you can easily check the box for that at the campaign level rather than adjusting it in the content controls and exclusions Display Network campaigns definitely have a few nuanced ways of optimizing them that are different than other campaign types whether video or search campaigns and they might not always necessarily be intuitive to people who haven't run those campaign types before so hopefully this rundown of this four to five optimization tricks for Google Display Network campaigns is going to help you make the most of your ad Budget on the network but if you have any additional questions about some of these optimizations or display campaigns in general feel free to leave us a note in the comments below thanks for watching our 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