What is a Google Display Ad?
Display ads are visual-based ads that you see while reading an article or watching a video. Display ads reach 90% of internet users on the Google Display Network. Double-edged sword: Reach potential is immense, but with this power comes the responsibility of effective marketing strategy.
How Can Google Display Ads Help Your Business?
Google is a marketing tool. It targets visitors interested in your subject, and each person who clicks on the ad is an opportunity gone wrong gone right. It’s easy to sign up with Google too. These ads have a high CPM, which is a cost per 1000 impressions.
Google Display ads will let you:
- Target based on location, keywords, topics, or demographics
- Get a clear overview of how your ad is performing with live data
- Save time by skipping the guesswork and automating your optimization efforts
- Boost your product or service’s sales.
- Accelerate your purchasing process.
- Increase brand visibility and direct traffic to your website
What are the Types of Google Ad campaigns?
1. Search Ads
Search ads appear on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) when users enter relevant queries. These text-based ads are designed to match user intent and are an effective way to increase visibility for specific keywords, driving targeted traffic to your website.
Example: A local bakery wants to increase online visibility and attract more customers searching for “fresh pastries near me.” By running search ads, the bakery can ensure its business appears at the top of the search results when users in the vicinity look for relevant terms, leading to increased foot traffic and online orders.
2. Performance Max
Google’s Performance Max campaigns are designed to simplify the ad creation process by automatically optimizing ad placements across various Google properties. This type of campaign leverages machine learning to maximize performance across Search, Display, YouTube, and Discover, allowing advertisers to reach a broader audience with minimal effort.
Example: An online clothing retailer aims to maximize its digital presence across various Google platforms. Using Performance Max campaigns, the retailer can effortlessly extend its reach to potential customers on Google Search, Display Network, YouTube, and Discover. The campaign’s machine learning algorithms optimize placements and bids to achieve the best overall performance.
3. Display Ads
Display ads are visually appealing and appear on websites within the Google Display Network (GDN). These campaigns use images, videos, or interactive media to capture the attention of users as they browse the internet, providing an effective way to build brand awareness and engage potential customers.
Example: A travel agency wants to promote vacation packages to a targeted audience. Display ads featuring stunning images of popular travel destinations are strategically placed on travel-related websites within the Google Display Network. This visually appealing approach captures the attention of potential travelers and encourages them to explore the offered vacation packages.
4. Shopping
Ideal for e-commerce businesses, Shopping ads showcase product images, prices, and store information directly on the search results page. This format allows users to make informed purchase decisions before clicking on the ad, making it a powerful tool for promoting products and driving sales.
Example: An electronics retailer wants to showcase its latest smartphones to users actively searching for such products. By running Shopping ads, the retailer can display images, prices, and product details directly in the search results. Users interested in purchasing a smartphone can compare options at a glance and click through to the retailer’s website to make a purchase.
5. Video Ads
Video ads are displayed on YouTube and other partner sites within the Display Network. They come in various formats, including skippable and non-skippable ads, and can be a compelling way to convey your message through storytelling, demonstrations, or visually engaging content.
Example: A fitness equipment manufacturer wants to launch a new product – a smart home gym system. Using engaging video ads on YouTube, the manufacturer can showcase the features and benefits of the product, targeting fitness enthusiasts. The videos may include demonstrations of workouts, testimonials, and visually compelling content to encourage viewers to learn more and make a purchase.
6. Demand Gen (Demand Generation)
Demand Gen campaigns focus on creating awareness and interest in a product or service before the user actively seeks it out. These campaigns often involve content marketing, lead generation, and educational materials to build a relationship with potential customers and guide them through the sales funnel.
Example: A software company that specializes in productivity tools wants to generate interest in its upcoming project management software. Instead of focusing on direct sales, the company launches a demand generation campaign. This includes creating informative blog posts, hosting webinars, and offering downloadable resources to educate potential customers about the benefits of efficient project management. The goal is to build awareness and nurture leads who may eventually convert into paying customers.
Other Campaign Types (Without a Goal’s Guidance)
7. App Ads
App Ads on Google are designed to promote mobile applications across various Google properties, reaching users on their smartphones and tablets. These ads aim to increase app installations and engagement.
Example: A fitness tracker app aims to grow its user base using Google App Ads. The ads feature a catchy headline, an appealing app icon, and an “Install Now” button. Targeting fitness enthusiasts, these ads appear in Google search results, on the Display Network, and YouTube. This strategic placement ensures visibility when users search for fitness-related terms, driving direct installations from app stores.
8. Smart Ads
Smart Ads leverage machine learning to automatically generate and optimize ad creatives based on your business assets (images, headlines, logos). These ads are designed to reach potential customers across different Google networks and adjust their format for maximum impact.
Example: An online clothing store wants to increase sales using Smart Ads. These ads dynamically generate content based on available images, headlines, and logos. As users browse, Smart Ads automatically adjust displayed items to match preferences, providing a personalized experience. This dynamic approach enhances engagement, leading to higher click-through rates and conversions for the online retailer.
9. Hotel Ads
Hotel Ads appear on Google Search, Maps, and the Google Travel platform, providing a platform for hotels to showcase their properties. These ads include information such as prices, availability, and user reviews.
Example: A luxury resort in Bali aims to boost bookings using Google Hotel Ads. The ads showcase the resort’s name, location, images, pricing, and a “Book Now” button. Targeting users searching for luxury accommodation in Bali, these ads appear on Google Search, Maps, and Google Travel. Travelers easily access details and reviews, streamlining bookings directly through the resort’s website or partner platforms. Google Hotel Ads simplify the user journey, enhancing visibility and increasing bookings for the luxury resort.
How to set up a Google Display Ad campaign
Creative marketing strategies such as Google Display Ads can be a great way to reach your target audience. Once you’ve set up your campaign, the Google Ads team will make sure it’s showing up in the right places. Google Display Ads can be a great way to reach your target audience. After setting up your campaign, the Google Ads team will make sure it’s showing up in the right places.
How to start using targeted Display ads
You can create ads based on your target audiences, such as people interested in certain topics, their age, their gender, and more. You can also show these ads at different times, such as during specific times of the day or day of the week. This means your ad can show up on websites related to your business or to people who match the specific criteria you’ve specified.
If you aren’t already running ads on the Google Display Network as part of your Google Ads account, here’s how you can do it.
Step 1: Sign in to Google Ads
Log in to your Google Ads account. If you don’t have an account, you’ll need to create one.
Step 2: Navigate to Campaign Creation
- In the Google Ads dashboard, click on the “+” sign to create a new campaign.
- Select “New Campaign” and choose your advertising goal. For Display Ads, you might want to choose the “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance” option for more customization.
Step 3: Choose Campaign Type
- Select “Display” as your campaign type.
- Choose the “Standard display campaign” option for more control over your settings.
Step 4: Set Up Campaign Details
- Campaign Name: Provide a name for your campaign that clearly reflects its purpose.
- Networks: Choose “Google Display Network” to display your ads on relevant websites across the internet.
- Locations and Languages: Specify the geographic locations and languages that align with your target audience.
Step 5: Set Budget and Bidding
- Budget: Determine your daily or campaign budget, indicating the maximum amount you’re willing to spend.
- Bidding: Choose your bidding strategy based on your campaign goals. Options include manual CPC (Cost Per Click) or automated bidding strategies.
Step 6: Choose Audiences and Demographics
- Audiences: Define your target audience by selecting demographics, interests, or behaviors. You can also create custom audiences based on website visitors or customer lists.
- Demographics: Specify age, gender, parental status, and other demographic details if relevant to your campaign.
Step 7: Create Ad Group
- Ad Group Name: Assign a name to your ad group that reflects the specific theme or targeting criteria.
- Placements: Choose where you want your ads to appear. You can select specific websites, topics, or audiences.
- Targeting Expansion: Decide if you want to enable targeting expansion to reach additional audiences beyond your selected criteria.
Step 8: Create Display Ads
- Ad Formats: Choose between responsive display ads or upload your own image ads. Responsive ads automatically adjust their size and appearance to fit different ad spaces.
- Assets: Upload high-quality images, logos, headlines, and descriptions. Ensure your visuals and copy are compelling and relevant to your target audience.
Step 9: Preview and Save
- Preview Ads: Review how your ads will appear on different devices and ad spaces.
- Save and Continue: Save your ad group settings and proceed to review your campaign details.
Step 10: Review and Launch
- Review Campaign Settings: Double-check all campaign details, targeting criteria, and ad creatives.
- Launch Campaign: Once satisfied, click “Launch Campaign” to set your Display Ads live.
Step 11: Monitor and Optimize
- Regularly check your campaign performance in the Google Ads dashboard.
- Analyze metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversion rates.
- Optimize your campaign by adjusting targeting, bidding, or creative elements based on performance insights.
How to Create Responsive Google Display Ads?
- Sign in to your Google Ads account. If you don’t have an account, create one.
- Navigate to the “Campaigns” section in the Google Ads dashboard.
- Click the “+” icon to create a new campaign. Choose “Display” as your campaign type.
- Choose your campaign goal, such as sales, leads, or website traffic. Responsive Display Ads work well for various goals.
- Set up your campaign details, including the campaign name, budget, bidding strategy, and targeting options.
- Within your campaign, create a new ad group. Name it appropriately and set targeting options like demographics and interests.
- Select “Responsive display ad” as your ad type when prompted.
- Google Ads will prompt you to add various assets such as headlines, descriptions, images, and logos. Ensure your assets are high-quality and engaging.
- Unlike traditional ads, you don’t create specific ad combinations. Instead, Google dynamically combines your assets to generate different ad variations.
- Review the preview of your responsive ads. Google Ads will show you how your ads may appear on different devices and placements. Once satisfied, save your ad group.
- After creating your responsive ads, click “Launch Campaign” to set your campaign live.
- Regularly monitor your campaign performance in the Google Ads dashboard. Use insights to optimize your assets or adjust targeting to improve results.
To add a YouTube link to this section, click the plus Videos button and type in a YouTube link. Below “Images and logos,” click the plus Images button to add an image to this section.
Fill out your contact details, including your title, email, and phone number. Then, you can use responsive display ads to make sure your display ads render well across the various types of devices and screens you may be running ads on.
How to reach customers based on demographics?
Demographics are a type of marketing that targets people by gender, age, race, ethnicity, or other characteristics. The following types of skin include:
Age: “18-24,” “25-34,” “35-44,” “45-54,” “55-64,” “65 or more,” and
Gender: “Female,” “Male,” “Unknown,” “Prefer not to answer,” and “N/A (not applicable)”
Parental status: “Parent,” “Not a Parent,” and “Unknown.
You can also set the criteria for who sees your ad, by setting the audience. For example, suppose you plan to run a campaign that is only directed towards a specific segment (i.e., 65 or older). In that case, you can exclude all other segments (age groups) from being included.
As you increase your specific targeting, you will decrease your reach. It’s important to be clear and specific in your targeting to ensure you are reaching the right people—test different combinations of targeting options to see which brings you the most conversions.
What is Google Display Ads Network?
Google Display Network is a network of advertising placements across the web. Two components of the Google Display Network are AdSense for Content and the Ad Exchange. This is an overview of how they work, how you can participate in them, and what to expect from them. Google AdSense for Content AdSense for Content is a network of sites that have signed up to host AdSense ads. For each pageview on these sites, you earn an ad impression. You also earn money for clicks on those ads.
Google Display Ad Targeting
You should target your ads to fit the context of the product or service you’re advertising. You’ve probably already designed the perfect ad; it just needs to be shown to the right people at the right time in order to effectively reach your goals. Google Ads offers various ways to target your ads, and each one will help you to reach your goals.
Audience Targeting
If you want to target your ad at demographics that are most likely to purchase from you, then you need to know how they use your site. Are they using your products or services the way they expect to use them? Do they buy your products online or do they prefer to talk to a real person?
Use custom intent
Selecting the right terms to describe your customers helps you choose what keywords you’ll add to your pages and which ads to show. You can also choose words to use in your meta description, but it’s best not to choose anything that’s too specific. This will keep you from showing up in search results for unrelated queries.
Retargeting
Display ads to users that are already visiting your website or using your app. They’re more likely to purchase from you. This user can be in any stage of conversion, as long as they’ve visited your site or clicked on your ad before. They are very likely to come back and buy if they have already purchased from this seller.
Steps on Google Ads Display Targeting
- Go to the Display Network tab in your Google Ads account
- Add + Demographics to the targeting tab and select the ad group you’d like to add demographic categories.
- Click “Target Audiences,” and select the demographics you want to target or create new audiences using the Audience Builder. Then click “Create Audiences,” or “Apply Audiences,” and select the audiences that have been created.
Content targeting
Topics are a great way to get more people to your landing page. When you use a topic, you can direct your ads to as many different pages at once. Google can help you reach a broad range of pages on the Display Network by analyzing the content on the pages. When deciding what pages to display, it considers factors like text, language, link structure, and page structure. This is a useful tool for tracking and targeting ads based on your topics and interests. It then determines the central themes of each webpage and targets ads based on your topic selections.
Content keyword selection
Choose words relevant to your product or service to target users making searches using those same terms. If you want to get your business in front of the right audience, the key is to create a series of tailored keywords for the different search phrases that interest your customer. For example, you can change your keywords to reflect your seasonal interests or make the most of a sale.
Display expansion for search
Let Google Ads find users for you with a combination of automated bidding and smart targeting. In addition, display expansion is available for both Search and Display campaigns, which target the highest-performing moments for the most successful results.
Where Do Google Display Ads Appear?
Google Display Ads can appear before, below, or above search results on Google Search.
They show up in search results on Google Play, the shopping tab, and Google Maps, including the Maps app. In addition, the Shopping tab can sometimes appear alongside the search results, so you can get a quick look at the items available for purchase.
When you search on Google, you may see a box that says “Ads” or “Google Ads”. Sometimes you’ll see a small text link with “Learn More” below it. The text link takes you to a page about Google Ads, but you can also click the “Learn More” button to go directly to Google’s AdChoices program, which has an opt-out tool.
Search ads vs Display ads
While Search ads show up to potential customers the moment that they start searching on Google for what you offer, Display ads show up while people are visiting sites across the Google Display Network.
Whether running an ad campaign on Amazon or another platform, you might not reach those who are actively looking for what you offer when running Display Ads. As the title of this chapter suggests, you need to introduce yourself and your business to your target audience. In order to do that, you need to find out who your ideal customers are, where they hang out online, what types of content they prefer, and how they prefer to interact with you and your brand. You will reach a wider audience if you make use of social media to advertise your book. It may be worth it to take time and money in order to create Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, etc.
How to optimize your Google Display Ads
Each of the following optimization strategies will be explained in detail. They all have a link to how they can either stretch your existing budget, improve your ads’ performance, or lower your costs.
Create an “Impression to Conversion” (ITC) column
Once you’ve removed all of the unnecessary columns and merged down the data, the next step in optimizing Google Ads performance on a reduced budget is to create new columns that will help you analyze data faster. You can fully optimize your search campaigns by creating an additional campaign on Amazon. You’ll be able to fully utilize your keyword list when using these new keywords.
A good example of this would be the “Impression to Conversion” columns that appear in various publications. This is an important factor in determining whether a piece of content is going to convert or not. But, again, this is a custom column you can easily create that can be used to make your Amazon optimization much simpler.
ITC is Conversions/Impressions (ITC%)
Get rid of distracting vanity metrics.
Having too many different columns to set up and manage can get in the way of running an effective campaign. It’s a good idea to keep the number of columns you have to set up or manage to a minimum and focus your efforts on those most valuable to your business.
Add more exact keywords (and pause your phrase match)
Another strategy for optimizing your Google Ads performance on a reduced budget is adding more exact keywords. This is actually something you should always aim to do with your paid search campaigns, but when reducing your budget, you should spend most of your PPC account management time doing this.
The rule of thirds is about the art of composition, the use of space, and how a scene should be designed.
Make your ads appeal to potential buyers
A successful ad should be relevant and impactful.
Set your ad apart from the rest of your competitors: Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to see which ads are showing for a particular search. When advertising, don’t just promote price and discount. Instead, feature what differentiates you from your competitors, such as superior quality, superior customer service or an innovative approach to solving problems.
You need to convey how people will benefit from buying from you. For example, when people buy from you they’ll get more for their money, which will make them feel good about themselves.
Don’t go overboard and list dozens of features, make your offer stand out from the crowd. To stand out from your competition, it’s not enough to simply include selling points. You need to make sure that your message is easy to understand and that it leaves an impression.
Digital Agency that Can Help You With Google Display Ads
If you’re a digital marketer, you’ve likely heard about Google Display Ads. However, if you’re new to the field, it might be a little confusing to start. Luckily, a few great tools make it easier for new marketers to create and implement Google display ads.
If you are having difficulty starting this journey, we can suggest a reliable agency that is an expert in Google Display Ads. Ubique Digital Solutions is an all-in-one agency that will help you with all your digital marketing work and make tough things easier and better. With a team of experts, acing your Google campaign will be less hassle and will give you the best results that you ever wanted. Contact UDS today.
FAQs
Q: What are Google display ads best for?
Google display ads are ideal for increasing brand visibility, reaching a broader audience, and showcasing visual content on various websites and apps.
Q: What is the difference between Google Ads and display ads?
Google Ads is a comprehensive advertising platform, while display ads are a specific format within Google Ads, focusing on visual content for broader reach.
Q: When should you use display ads?
Use display ads when aiming to build brand awareness, promote visual content, or target a wide audience across websites and apps within the Google Display Network.
Q: How can I see where my display ads are showing?
You can see the tracked ad placements in your Ads Manager.
Q: How long does Google take to optimize display ads?
In general, Google takes about 24 hours to optimize a display ad.
