This is the second in a series of posts Digging Into Display. Check back daily for new tips and strategies for succeeding in the world of Display.
There’s a lot of ways to manage your Google Display Network campaigns to ensure success. Yesterday, we introduced Digging Into Display, our latest Clix Marketing Blog series. Today we’re going to look at a few of the ways you can improve your GDN campaigns. Just like with search, there’s many way to manage campaigns. Let’s touch on some of the strategies for optimizing your display campaigns.
Placement Performance
Tucked away in the Dimensions tab of your Display campaigns lives the report that will quickly tell you where your ads have been appearing across the GDN. Throwing this information into a pivot table will best serve you when you’re hunting for both good and bad performers by showing each line only once. Check out this post for more information on quickly filtering reports for top and under performing placements.
Once you have identified sites that are performing well for your campaigns or account, breaking them out into their own ad group or campaign may be a good way to increase the control you have over your ads on this placement, potentially increasing performance even more.
For underperforming sites, it’s advised you add the URL as an excluded placement. You can do this by going to the Display Network tab and clicking the red Targeting button. You can add the exclusion at the campaign-level or the ad group-level. You can add up to 10,000 placements per campaign.
If you would like to exclude placements for multiple campaigns, you can do that through the Shared Library. Once you’re in the Shared Library click “Campaign placement exclusions.” You can create lists of exclusions that can be added to multiple campaigns. If you need more help, check out this explanation from Google.
Managing Mobile App Placements
While perusing the Autoplacements report, you may have noticed some placements that have “mobileapp::” in front of them. As you could guess, these are placements in mobile apps. Before you jump to conclusions and assume that they’re all garbage placements, take a look and make sure you won’t be getting rid of some quality performance. In a society that’s as mobile as we are today, it’s worth a test to see if mobile app placements can work for your account before categorically excluding them. It’s really dependent on the campaign as to whether they’ll perform well, poorly or somewhere in between.
Something to keep in mind when it comes to mobile apps is that if you aren’t seeing conversions, but you’re getting clicks, it might be thanks to small kids and/or fat fingers. If the apps are kid-related, it might be worth adding the kid apps as exclusions and continuing to give other apps a chance.
If you decide to chop mobile apps all together, you can add “adsenseformobileapps.com” as an exclusion to prevent ads from appearing in any mobile apps.
Keyword Performance
Managing Display campaigns with keyword (contextual) targeting can be similar to managing keywords in regular Search campaigns. However, remember that there are many factors that go into placing your ad on a webpage in this campaign -type. Language, location, website content, and recent browsing history are just a few of the things that come into play when GDN places your ad.
There are some similarities between Search and Display keywords that you should keep in mind:
- Just like with placements, you’ll want to break keywords into themes by ad groups so that you have the most control.
- Unlike most of what you’re told with Search keywords, you’ll want to make your Display keywords
all broad match. (Technically there are no match types on the GDN, but display keywords should look like broad match in the interface.) - Similar to Search, you’ll definitely want to take advantage of good performing keywords and& make bid adjustments as necessary for good and bad performing keywords.
Have a favorite way to manage your Display campaigns that wasn’t mentioned? Tell us about it in the comments. Make sure to check back daily for more on GDN in our Digging Into Display series!
