By Charlie Cummins – bbmm.ie
The 2015 series of Google Breakfast Briefings continued today on the topic of the Google Display Network (GDN) and how to use it effectively. The benefits of using the Google Display Network was highlighted by an interesting statistic presented at the start of the briefing.
Google noted that only 5% of total time online is spent on searching. The other 95% is spend actually “viewing”, be that emails, videos, websites, apps etc. Thus, the Google Display Network offers a great opportunity to take full advantage of that “95%”.
Context and Audience:
Two key elements to ensuing proper and effective targeting of messages are context and audience. Context is where your target consumer is: what they’re doing online, what their interests are, what keywords will reach them
Audience is who your consumer is: the usual demographic factors of age, gender, region/location and so on.
When you know who your consumers are and what they’re interested in, they’re much easier to target with appropriate messages, based on their interaction with your website and where they may be on the path to purchase.
Targeting Options:
Within the settings of your AdWords account, you can choose how to deliver your message through a number of targeting options. You can also set limits on how often ads are shown and at what levels of budget.
Contextual Targeting: use of keywords to have your ads display when consumers are viewing related topics online (e.g. a travel ad appears when users are on, say, a tourism site.)
In Market Audience: have your ads displayed to people whose online patterns put them into the “researching your product and intending to buy” category. This finds customers who are researching products and actively considering buying a service or product like those you offer, and focuses on getting conversions from customers most likely to make a purchase.
Remarketing: This method of targeting allows you to show ads to people who have previously visited your website (tracked via cookies). Your ads will be displayed to them as they browse online.
Dynamic Remarketing: this takes remarketing a step further, by letting you show previous visitors ads based on products or services they viewed on your website.
Creating Display Ads
The Google Display Network can deliver two forms of ad. The simple text based ads familiar to all of us as the “AdWords” which show up in the search results page. And the more dynamic, richer display ads, containing photos, images, text, etc. configured in standardised sizes for website display.
More information on the best performing ad sizes can be found via this link to Google: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6002621?hl=en
For clients who don’t have existing display ads, Google provides a service called AdWords Ad Gallery (it can be found and accessed from within clients’ AdWords accounts). The tool lets you create display ads as easily as inputting your website’s URL, from which it will pull images, text, contacts and so on into a variety of template ads ready to use.
For more information on using the Google Display Network please email [email protected]
