Your First Google Ads Display Campaign – The Optimization

One of the big mistakes beginners make is taking Ads Display advertising for granted and thinking that you don’t have much to do when you create that type of a  campaign.
That is not true, Display is as important as Search. There is a lot you can do to help your campaign get better results. I’m going to write down some of the things you should take a look at and some of the things you absolutely must do in order to up your display game.

Your main guy – CTR

The most important metric you should be sure to look at is your campaign’s CTR – Click through rate. It gives you the percentage of clicks against the number of impressions. The higher the CTR, the more clicks you get, your smile gets wider. Average CTR on Google is 0.1% – 0.3%. In my opinion, if you are below 0.2%, don’t think of it as a success. But learn from it, and approach your planning differently next time.
The reason is, we should all strive for at least 0.5%. Everything below that and above 0.2% is average. Of course, if we are talking about something very compelling, some kind of big discount or something similar, then you should be looking to have even higher CTR. Also, remarketing campaigns result in higher CTR, but more on remarketing later.

I know what you are thinking, there is a lot of other metrics to look at, but when it comes to Display, CTR is definitely the most important one. Conversions are also very important but that is a story to itself. More on that in my future blog posts, also.

Small changes

I’m sure that you are terrified of the idea of your women’s clothes banner showing up on a website that is supposed to be some kind of male’s online magazine. This is probably going to be your greatest concern. So go right ahead and click on placements.

Here you’ll be able to see all the sites or apps your ads showed on. I’m sure you’ll be able to find some that you don’t think are a good choice for your ads. But, before you dig in, think about the size of the internet and how many apps or sites are there. So, the smart thing to do here would be to sort them by the highest cost and then consider taking them out. But, just because you don’t take some of the sites seriously, doesn’t mean that your audience thinks the same. So, before excluding something, take a quick look at clicks and CTR that placement provided for you. If those numbers are good, leave it be.

Big changes

Similar steps should be taken on optimizing your targeting whether you’ve used keywords, demographics, affinity audiences and/or topics targeting. Choose the ones you’ve used and see how they performed. Some examples of optimization you could use:

• Maybe some of the keywords you’ve used haven’t made a great impact but are spending your budget. Exclude them, do another keyword research and put those down.
• Maybe you didn’t care about age targeting while creating your campaigns and you see that elderly people (65+) are spending your budget but are not valuable to your business. Exclude them.
• But maybe you missed the topics targeting. It doesn’t get you any results. Change the angle, target people with affinity audiences, see if that could work. Or maybe keywords.

The examples are numerous…

Even bigger changes

If you are limited by your budget (you know you are because Google told you :P), take a look at Devices and Ad schedule. Maybe Mobile beats Desktop when it comes to your campaign. Or maybe people click on your ad more on Monday than they do on the weekend. Choosing devices your ads show on or scheduling your ads by day and hour could easily focus your budget better and help you not waste more money.

The biggest of them all

The greatest leap you could take is changing the Location you are advertising in. But in my opinion, this should be used only if you’ve taken everything into account and that means your micro conversions, your macro conversions etc. You have to know, precisely, where do your customers come from, what makes sense and what doesn’t. This is something that will tell you a lot about your marketing strategy.

It’s not that simple now, is it? This is just the start. Wait until we get to remarketing and other important Adwords features. But don’t rush into anything.
Go through this again and try to implement it into your campaign. Let me know if it worked for you!