Google Display Network Targeting Options Explained 2022

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the surfside ppc youtube channel today i'm going to be going over google display network targeting so you can understand everything you need to know about targeting your ads across the google display network so if you're not familiar with the google display network it is made up of over 35 million websites and apps and your ads are going to run on google owned properties such as youtube and gmail as well so basically any website any app that is running google ads is part of the google display network and you can actually serve your ads to people as they browse whether it's youtube gmail or any of the websites or apps that are part of the google display network so we're going to come back over here to google ads and what we're going to do is click on the plus sign we're going to create a new campaign and the first thing we need to do is choose our campaign objective so generally you want to choose sales or leads if you're using conversion tracking so that you can optimize for your conversion goals so for me i'm going to be optimizing for my purchase conversion goal on my website and we're going to remove these other options here because i'm not going to be optimizing for them for this campaign so you can see here i have purchases we're going to click on continue the next step is to select a campaign type so in this case we're going to choose display and what we're going to do is choose a standard display campaign so the standard display campaign you have optimized targeting so you get the same exact benefits of a smart display campaign so i always choose standard display campaign here next is going to be entering your business website so i always enter my website in this step when i'm creating display campaigns because it can help with your targeting and then campaign name i'll just leave it as is so we're going to click on continue now the next thing we need to do is choose our campaign settings and in this case i just want to show you the page that i'm going to be advertising because it'll help as we choose our targeting so i'm going to be advertising this page 52 beautiful farmhouse decorations if we scroll down there's a bunch of different products for sale some different decorating ideas so ultimately my goal is to drive people to this page need to update this number here but ultimately my goal is to drive people to this page so that they can purchase something from my website so we're going to come back over here and let's go over targeting so to get started the first thing is location targeting so you obviously want to target the locations where your customers are and the areas you actually serve so what you can do here is choose all countries and territories united states and canada united states or if we click on enter another location we can choose any location here so let's just go to advanced search and let's just say for example we want to target and we'll stick to united states for a lot of these examples here since that's where i'm located let's just say you want to target louisiana so what you could do here is just enter louisiana the state and target it otherwise you can see right here they have louisville kentucky comes up because that's all i entered and it's going to be the nielsen dma region so if you decide you know what i just want to target new orleans you can choose that here and when you enter new orleans you can target the city so if we click on target for the city you're going to see it's not the largest area so just a small portion here so what you can do if you're looking to target a larger area is target the nielsen dma region and click on target you're going to see it's much larger here so basically this is targeting an entire metro area otherwise what you can do is choose individual cities individual states you can target counties generally for me when i'm running advertisements i will just do united states and canada since that's who usually purchases from my website the most so coming down next is going to be language targeting and what you want to do is select languages your customers speak so you can see here it's saying based on my targeted locations i may want to add french to my targeting as well in this case i'm just going to choose english as my language targeting because that is the primary language that my customers speak now if you come over here you can choose from any of these languages here and it really depends on who you're targeting and what you're promoting so that's location and language targeting pretty simple there so if we click on next down here at the bottom so next is budget and bidding so let's just set a 10 budget for example and we'll be bidding for conver conversions we can set a target cpa they're recommending three dollars and eighty cents so we'll say let's do let's up this a little bit to fifteen dollars so we could drive a few more conversions every day so right now our bidding strategy would be conversions and we want to get conversions by automatically maximizing conversions and we're paying for clicks so we can click on next here i've went over bidding strategies in a previous video and i went over budgeting in a previous video as well i will link them in the video description for this video so if you want more information about either of those topics i do have that as a recent video on my channel so we'll click on next here and let's get into targeting so first things first you're going to see optimized targeting is set up for you so optimize targeting allows us to drive more conversions by using information such as our landing page and our assets you can opt out or speed up optimization by adding targeting first so basically what you can do is use optimize targeting it's going to give us 10 billion plus plus available impressions and we can click on next and just start creating our advertisements now that's not what i'm going to do we're going to get back over here to targeting but that is an option you have if you're just looking for a large audience and you want to allow google ads to try to find the best audience for your advertisements based on your landing page and based on your advertisements now what we're going to do is click on add targeting so we can go through all these different options here now first things first if we click on audience segments here it's going to say suggest who should see your ads so when we're targeting audience segments that's targeting people you're not targeting specific websites you're not start targeting specific topics or keywords that appear on websites you're targeting actual people and their interests now if we come over here to browse there are some different options here so you have who they are so detailed demographics you have what their interests and habits are these are considered affinity audiences what they are actively researching or planning these are in market and life event audiences how they have interacted with your business so these are going to be people who have either watched one of your videos on youtube people who have visited your website somebody who has interacted with your mobile app all of these are different ways that you can actually retarget people across the google display network and then you can combine audience segments and you can create custom audience segments as well so let's start at the very top and do detailed demographics so these are pretty simple to understand so parental status you can target parents of infants parents of toddlers parents of preschoolers i'm not going to go through every single targeting option here because there are literally thousands of options but you can see here you could target people based on their parental status based on their marital status their overall education and their home ownership status so that's detailed demographic so a pretty quick and easy example if you're targeting parents of infants 0-1 years old that's a perfect option for people who are looking to buy diapers if you want to get your diaper brand out there so just one option when you have with detailed demographics now next is gonna be what their interests and habits are so affinity audiences so these for example if we go to home and garden do-it-yourselfers home decor enthusiasts if we go to food and dining coffee shop regulars fast food cravers so just for example fast food cravers are going to be people who seek out fast food and other quick and inexpensive dining options so for affinity segments it's not what people are actively looking up it's basically one of their interests so you're targeting people based on their overall interests so for example i'm a fan of professional baseball so if we scroll down here and we look at sports and fitness and we click on the drop down you can see sports fans we click on the drop down again and you can see baseball fans here so this would target people who follow or enjoy playing baseball so just one option you have with targeting with affinity audiences going to be much more broad so you're kind of putting people into these broad groups of what their interests and habits are even though they're not actively looking up anything to do with whatever the affinity category is i might be someone who's a baseball fan based on my previous browsing history some of the websites i visit some of the things that i look up however currently it might be something that i'm not interested in at all or something i'm not paying attention to at all so you're really trying to reach people based on a broad interest now next is going to be in market and life events so in market means someone is in the market to purchase something so if we click over and we look at in-market segments we can see here under autos and vehicles we'll click on the drop down auto parts and accessories you can see car batteries so if i choose that that means someone is actively interested in purchasing a car battery so if you're selling car batteries if you have a huge selection that's one option you have when you're trying to target a one of these in-market segments here now we'll bring this up again you can see there's a ton of different in-market segments here so basically anything you can possibly think that people are looking up to purchase you can find here so people who are looking to travel people are looking for specific software people who are looking to buy real estate so all of these are going to be in in-market segments and it's people who have shown through their browsing history that they are actively looking up some of these different products or services or whatever it is so with in-market segments that's one of the great ways to reach people as they are actually interested in purchasing something next is life events this can also be a great way to target somebody so for example i can say somebody who is moving and somebody who is moving soon and i can target them with an advertisement for maybe i'm a mover and i want to find everybody within a certain area who is moving soon and offer my services and say that people could take the headache out of moving by choosing my moving company and let's just say it's not expensive so you can start to sell your services to people who are actively researching or planning something now one thing to keep in mind is if we come over here to search so at any time you can come here to search and i can just say you know what i want to target people who are looking for home decor and we click on enter it's going to pull up the categories and the different audiences that are going to be the best for whatever we search here and you can see by searching home decor i get the in-market segment for home decor for living rooms that's people who are actively looking up living room furniture and decorations so all these different things are different categories that i could actually start to target now the other thing is it's going to start with in-market segments at the top and then you can see what their interests and habits are so some affinity segments here home and garden do-it-yourselfers home decor enthusiasts so we'll lift that up some custom audience segments so you can actually create your own audience segments which i'll go through in a little bit so i could target any of these here who they are so detailed demographics so that's another option you have how they have interacted with your business so all these are similar segments which i'll go through in a minute and then it gets down to some of my website visitor audiences so some of my different remarketing audiences that i'm targeting so just some different options if you do come up here and search you can find a lot of these much easier rather than going through each individual option here but we'll go through more here and come back to browse so we'll come back one more time so in market and life events definitely better if you're trying to drive conversions than affinity i've never seen a ton of success with just targeting affinity and detailed demographics because they're generally too broad so you really want to target people who are actively looking up something so that you can get them to hopefully purchase from you now next is how they have interacted with your business so with this you're seeing your data in similar segments so if we click on the right on the arrow here similar segments are built based on all the remarketing lists that i've created so if we come down here you're going to see website visitors so all of these are because i have linked my google analytics account to my google ads account and i've created remarketing audiences so i will go through exactly how to do that in a separate video but you can see here i have all users to my website over the last 540 days so this is anywhere from 49 000 to 160 000 people who are browsing the google display network and as you can see as we scroll down here so i have bedding curtains farmhouse sinks new visitors over the last 30 days returning users and a smart list so i'll go through remarketing in a follow-up video but when you do create these audiences as well i can actually retarget people who have visited my website you can do the same thing with youtube so if somebody watches one of your youtube videos and then what happens is you're going to get similar segments so you saw all my website visitor lists and then if we come over to some similar segments i can say okay anyone similar to all users over the last 540 days so this list is 47 000 to 400 000 and basically what google ads is doing is saying okay we're going to take the average interests the demographics the location for everybody in the 540-day audience and we're going to create a similar audience that you can target that's going to be highly relevant so people who haven't visited my website yet but are very similar to people who have visited my website so they should be more likely to convert just based on their interest and what they are looking up so if we're looking here and we're looking at some of these different audiences especially these top four generally if you start from the bottom and move your way up these are going to be your best audiences here at the bottom up at the top detailed demographics and affinity audiences are going to be much more broad so if you're looking for that broad audience to target with your overall brand message or some type of promotion think of these as more of a television commercial whereas the ones as you get further down are going to be more you want people to respond to these ads and hopefully convert so that's the way that i've always looked at some of these different audiences here and what we can do is let's just say we choose an in-market segment and we'll come down to home and garden and we'll choose home decor so what you can see is we click on this in market segment for home decor our impressions was 10 billion plus so we've lost 10 billion plus impressions since the last update but we still have a huge audience that we can target here so if we click on done we have one audience that we've targeted at this point now what i want to go through really quickly is if we come back here you can see combined audience segments and custom audience segments so if we click on these custom audience segments you can see i have four different audiences here and i basically rank them i have one two three and four so one is the most narrow audience four is the most broad audience and the other ones fall in between now let's just say i want to come down here and create a new custom segment so you want to name your segment so we'll just do example here and then you basically get two options people with any of these interests or purchase intentions and you want to add interest and purchase intentions here so for example i could say people who are interested in and you can see the base of my past conversion performance the ones that they give me here so i can click on all of these people who are looking for primitive farmhouse decor country farmhouse wall decor i could just enter farmhouse decor here i can enter specific products i could say farmhouse betting so you're looking at people who are interested in purchasing whatever keyword you enter so if i'm selling golf clubs i can answer golf clubs here if i'm selling travel packages i can enter something here like beach travel beach vacation packages so basically what you're trying to do is reach people who have specific purchase intentions based on whatever keywords you're entering so that's the first option you have here the other thing you can do is people who searched for any google search terms so i can say okay anybody who's looked up farmhouse decor we'll just enter the same examples here so this is a little bit different because people have actually went to google and used terms like this or very similar to this and what you're going to see here is just entering these two terms here my weekly impressions are 10 billion to 1 trillion so it's a huge huge audience so you can create these custom segments and you can also combine segments as well so i have four different options here now one thing to keep in mind if i'm targeting the home decor in market segment if i come over here and i enter let's just say this narrow audience and i want to make sure people in this narrow audience see my ads and i click on this you can see there's 10 billion impressions this didn't change so let's click on the next one and there's 10 billion plus impressions still and you'll see again this didn't change so if we remove this in-market audience here and we just have my custom audience segment my impressions go all the way down to 89 million and if we just scroll over impressions here you can see it says this is the estimated number impressions that your settings and targeting could theoretically reach so this is more than enough impressions based on my 15 per day daily budget but what you might want to do is look at some of these different audiences and try to make sure that you have a large enough audience that's also going to be very targeted so let's just say i keep these two custom audience segments for right now we click on done and we scroll down now one thing you can do is not use option optimized targeting i would recommend using optimize targeting because basically what google is going to try to do is find people beyond your targeting signals so google is going to use my audience segments but if they find other people outside of my audience segments that they think are likely to convert then optimize targeting will allow peop google to show my ads to those people so i would recommend keeping optimized targeting on if you're trying to drive conversions google ads will use all the data they have about your business to drive more conversions so coming down here to other targeting options so demographics pretty obvious here you can target by gender age parental status and household income so for example if i say the my my customer is generally a female age 25 to 64 and they're a parent which isn't exactly the case but let's just say i want to do that you can see it went from 89 million to 25 million so if you're using demographics you can make sure you're targeting people who are going to be the most likely to purchase from you in this case i'm going to keep mine wide open so we'll just and keep this all completely wide open and leave it at the 89 million impressions here but you can target specific demographics as well because if you know somebody is going to be more likely to convert and you know somebody looks more like your target customer whether it's male female specific age or specific parental status then that's what you want to enter here okay so you can see i don't have any demographics that i'm targeting and one thing you're going to see here is suggest people based on age gender and parental status so when you have optimized targeting on it's going to say suggest when you turn it off it's going to say reach so just a little difference there so i would recommend using optimized targeting you can see my impressions go way up with it on verse with it off so we have optimized targeting there more clicks more conversions based on my daily budget and my target cpa bid of three dollars and eighty cents now if we click on add targeting again three different things here so keywords topics and placements are going to be to target specific websites apps or videos so if i choose keywords for example what i can do is enter a huge list of keywords here and what google ads is going to do is trying to find relevant websites based on the keywords that i enter so if i enter keywords like farmhouse decor farmhouse furniture basically what google ads is going to do is try to find websites that these keywords are relevant to so for example my website farmhousegoals.com obviously these keywords would be really very relevant to it but if i was targeting keywords for example like auto parts and floor jacks and things like that then it was not likely to show at all on farmhousegoals.com now keep in mind keyword targeting is going to be completely contextual so google ads is using keywords on the page keywords that these websites actually target to target your advertisements so it's not going to be perfect by any stretch so if you do enter sports and things like that you might find your ads going onto websites that don't seem related to sports at all so don't consider this a perfect option if you are targeting keywords the other thing to keep in mind if you're suggesting these terms related to my products and services to get onto relevant websites as you enter keywords here so we'll do farmhouse decor again we'll do farmhouse betting so the same examples we do you can see my impressions drop way down so as you enter more and more targeting your overall impression forecast is going to go down so basically the number of impressions that you're targeting could theoretically reach is going to drop every time you add another layer of targeting whether it's demographics whether it's specific keywords now if you are targeting audience segments it's going to target every single audience segment you enter so if you come in here to targeted segments and you add an affinity audience and then you add one of these narrow custom intent audiences like i did what it's going to do is probably mostly target that affinity audience because it's combining both of them so if you want to target separate audience segments for example if you want to come in here and you want to target one affinity audience one in-market audience you want to target a remarketing list what you probably want to do is break them out into separate ad groups you might even want to create separate campaigns depending on what your goals are so click on done here and we'll come down and we'll click on add targeting again so the other two options here topics so suggest web pages apps and videos about a certain topic if we click here there's a bunch of topics already here so i could just say home and garden and we'll see what my impressions do so from 89 million to 7.7 million but i know that i'm targeting websites related to home and garden however the way the internet works at this point is you don't need to target people who have specific interests that are looking at specific websites at that time somebody who goes on their favorite sports website is probably still going to be interested in buying your farmhouse decorations and they'll still see your advertisements and potentially be just as likely to convert as they would be if they were on a home and garden website so i don't generally use topics unless i'm really trying to create a narrow targeted campaign so in this case i wouldn't enter any topics here last but not least if we click on add targeting placements you can suggest specific websites specific videos or apps where you'd like to show your ads so if you click come over to browse and let's just say i want to target golfing websites obviously it's not going to work for this example but it's if i just search golf in here it's going to pull up websites and youtube channels that are going to be more relevant to golf okay so if i click on the websites here you can see so golf.com golf digest golf monthly so i can click on all of these different websites and basically basically what i'm doing is i'm telling google ads now it's saying we'll get few or no impressions because my targeting is too narrow but basically i'm telling google ads can you please show my ads on these websites so i want to be on specific golf websites if i come back here i can choose maybe some different apps so there's a bunch of golf apps here some of them are just games but if we come back over youtube videos so i can target to specific youtube videos youtube channels so i can find some of these popular youtube channels and target them and then we have app categories so they have no matching results but i could potentially target a sports app category so when you do placements what you need to keep in mind is if you're targeting specific placements you're gonna have to create a huge list of placements to target i used to use placement targeting all the time now i've really just focused on audience targeting because google ads has gotten so good at understanding what people are actively searching and they've allowed people to easily create their own audiences so even if you want to create your own audience segments so we come over here you can see your custom audience segments create a custom segment here try to find people with specific interests or pers purchase intentions or people who search for specific search terms on google add a bunch of your keywords here and then start targeting them with your ads and you're going to find people who are going to be the most likely to convert that aren't on your remarketing list if your goal is to drive conversions and you're not worried at all about awareness then you really just want to focus on your data your website visitors people who have watched your videos people who have interacted with your mobile app those are going to be the best targeting options for driving conversions and driving conversion value however if you're kind of looking for a mix of awareness and conversions which is really the point of the google display network then what you want to do is try to use some of these in market some of these life event audiences try to use some of these similar segments create your own audience segments and you can even combine audience segments so i can put together both of these into one audience just like this and then i can target that as its own audience by itself so hopefully this all makes sense when it comes to targeting keep in mind if you're targeting audiences and you start layering in demographics keywords topics and placements your overall impressions are going to drop so your available impressions which will ultimately increase your costs and probably lead to less conversions so you want to find the right number here where you're not targeting 10 billion plus available impressions where something like 89 million is a good number to have because what you're trying to do is find the people that are going to be the most likely to convert so 89 million total impressions that are going to be available per week it's a lot of impressions but it's also going to probably be people that are more likely to convert than if i just came up here to audience segments and i started targeting come back over and started targeting an affinity audience so we'll just add any random one here and this is going to bring us definitely over our 10 billion impressions again so you can see here 10 billion plus impressions just by adding this affinity segment because it's just very broad categories so this is how you target different audiences on the google display network what i would recommend is if you are putting together a campaign create something like this where you're targeting a couple different segments and try to put together different targeting groups that you want to use and separate them into different ad groups so what you can do is use several different audiences in the same ad group but what you also might want to try is maybe putting in an in-market segment maybe layering in some demographic targeting and maybe you want to use a topic so just try to find some different audiences see what performs best see what drives the most conversions and then continue to use those audiences as you go because that's going to help you get the most out of your campaign now once you finish this step you click on next you're going to get into ad creation so then you just want to create your ads make sure you're driving traffic to your landing page and if you're using conversion tracking hopefully you can drive some conversions drive some conversion value so if you have any questions about targeting on the google display network please leave them in the comments section i will go through remarketing in more detail and i'll probably go through audiences one more time in another video thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the surfside ppc youtube channel