Your First Google Adwords Display Campaign – The Creation

Now, I’m sure that there are a lot of people who will say that this is very simple. Sure it is if you’re doing it wrong. Display advertising is often thought as serving annoying banners to people that don’t care about them. But, it can actually be very useful.

CAMPAIGN LEVEL

Just like when creating any other type of campaign, you have to choose your campaign’s goal.
Display campaign type has 5 options available:

• Sales – optimizing the campaign to get most sales whether they are online, in-app or in store. Finding people who are most likely to buy.
• Leads – encouraging customers to take action in order to get leads and conversions.
• Website traffic – get your targeted audience to your website.
• Product and brand consideration – get people to see your products and make them browse on your website
• Brand awareness and reach – helps you build your brand recognition

Again, I’m going to go with „Website traffic“. It’s the simplest and probably most used of the five, and I believe that most of you will choose that goal for your first campaign.
Also, just like the case is with Search campaigns, you can create your campaign without a goal, but I don’t recommend that.

Next thing you must do is choose your campaign’s subtype.
– Standard display campaign – banner ads on the Google Display Network
– Gmail campaign – show ads to people as they browse their emails
You can’t have both.

I’m going with Standard display campaign as this blog post is for this subtype.

First up are the location and languages you want to target. This is the first step in finding your target audience. Think about this thoroughly and remember that language is based on which language is set up in user’s browser settings. So, English should always be there, right? Right.

Bidding strategies:

Target CPA – setting bids to get the most conversions possible.
Maximise clicks – getting most clicks within set budget
Viewable CPM (cost-per-mille/thousand) – getting most viewable impressions possible (great for brand awareness)

Manual CPC – if you don’t believe Google’s automated strategies and want to set up your own. Or they don’t apply to your campaign.

Delivery method: Standard or Accelerated?
Standard is recommended, although if you are in the rush to get your ads out there as faster and as much as possible, use the Accelerated method.

Advanced tips: Should I use them?

The answer is: of freaking course.

The ones that are a must are ‘Start and end dates’, ‘Frequency capping’ and ‘Location options’.
The others will not make too much difference in your first and low–budget campaign results. But feel free to explore.

‘Start and end dates’ – if you’re advertising some kind of a discount or sale, it will probably come to an end. You don’t want to forget about it and keep the campaign running after the sale ends.
‘Frequency capping’ – the most important one in my opinion. Set the number of times you want a unique user to see your ads in a day, week or a month. You don’t want to have users (who will not click) seeing your ads 20 times in a month. That’s spending time, money, and impressions on wrong people. And you’re losing those people as potential customers one day. Even if they do like your brand and are interested, seeing you everywhere they go, will lose you some credibility.
‘Location options’ – just like in Search, this lets you target only people who are in, people who show interest in your targeted location or both. And same excluding options. Could be very useful if set up correctly. Think about your business and which people you want.

AD GROUP LEVEL

With creating your ad groups comes the real advanced targeting that you’ll be happy to hear about. There are three types of advanced targeting that you must take into consideration.

Audiences

Affinity – groups of interest–based people whether they are interested in technology, some hobby or if they love to travel. Anyway, the number of audiences you can use is large, so I’m sure you’ll be able to find what you are looking for.

Intent – people that are recently active in researching products and are considering buying something. These are the people you want if you are advertising some kind of a product or a service. Again, it doesn’t matter what you are selling or offering, I’m sure you’ll find your people here. Just like the case with affinity audiences is, the number of these audiences is large.

Remarketing – people who have previously interacted with your business in some way and similar audiences. I’m sure you’ve heard of remarketing. Well, it is what they say it is. With the right strategy, it can increase your number of conversions and leads greatly. But more on remarketing later.

Demographics

Quite useful, as it lets you target people by their age, gender, parental status, and household income. Note: household income is only available in US, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. If you have a target audience that is specified by its gender, age or even parental status… this is your place.

Content targeting – choose where you want your ads to show, not which people you want to reach.

By topics – the options are similar to affinity and intent audiences but this time you’re doing it the other way around, you’re targeting websites with targeted topics.

By placements – choose websites, apps or even videos where you want your ads to show.

By keywords – similar to search, you are using keywords as your focus and your ads appearing wherever target keywords are strong and present.

After you’ve done your targeting, you have an option of deciding whether you want to use automated targeting. Since this is your first campaign, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Keep it simple.

Type in your Ad group bid (how much your clicks are worth to you).

AD LEVEL

Two ways of adding your ads:

1. You can upload your own in which case you have to worry about dimensions and file size (150 kb max).
2. Create responsive ads right and there with Google’s free image library and copy options and so on.

For me, and I believe for everyone connected to Google advertising, if you are serious about your advertising strategy, you will use custom-made ads (first option).
Why? They are unique, different and people see that someone has put an effort into it.

Conclusion

So, as you can see, there’s a lot more to this than people believe. And this is just the beginning. Wait until you find out about the wonderful features of remarketing lists and its effects. But, just like I said, that is a bit more advanced.