Campaign Type & Network

Advertisers have the option to select campaign types namely a Standard or Gmail campaign type. For first-timers, it is highly recommended that you go with both the campaign types to gauge performance to determine which is more suitable. At the end of the day, you can track the performance through Google Analytics to make an informed choice.

Next, comes choosing the display network. These consist of two-tiers – the first include Google-owned sites like YouTube and second consist of AdSense sites (signed-up to display ads). Brands can either choose to display ads on select websites (based on your product knowledge) or can give control to the Google algorithm to select sites for the campaign.

Targeting Options

Before a brand begins a display campaign, it is important to understand the kind of targeting options presented by Google, which are:

• Remarketing Audiences: Displaying Ads to users familiar with your brand
• In-Market Audiences: Helps to raise awareness and considerations amongst users who are actively ‘in-market’ for specific product or service.
• Custom-Intent Audiences: Brands are allowed to use their own keywords, URLs and Apps to reach specific people making a purchase decision related to your product.
• Affinity Audiences: Display ads to people to generate awareness and consideration among the audience with similar interests (food, sports etc).
• Demographics Audiences: Advertisers are allowed to combine Google Analytics data to target the most popular demographics on your website.

Google Display Planner

This is a Google tool that provides ideas and estimates to enable planning of a Display network campaign. In the placement section of the campaign process, you can enter the relevant keywords and Google will pull-out the relevant websites, YouTube channels, Videos, Apps and App categories you can target. The planner generates ideas based on customer’s interests (affinities, in-market segments), topics, demographics (age & gender).

Each idea spelt out by the planner comes with impression estimates and historical costs. These figures would guide you to help plan a campaign rather than estimate future campaign costs. You would have to review suggested ideas as they can be sometimes too broad to be relevant for your business.

Google Ad Formats

When creating a new campaign, it is essential to test as many ad formats before finalizing a specific format. Let’s just look at the major ad formats available:

• Responsive Ads: Advertisers are required to upload their assets (image, headline, logo, videos and descriptions) and Google by itself generates numerous ads for display. These ads automatically adapt to any advertising space available.
• Image Ads: These ads would have a static or interactive image (.gif) to showcase your brand in a manner that is visually appealing.
• App Promotion Ads: These ads are meant to promote App downloads and engagement. They get displayed on - Google search, Partner websites and Apps.
• Video Ads: These run as stand-alone or between streaming video content.

Bidding Strategy

To drive more conversions and value, a brand must use automated bidding strategies such as:

• Target Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – This method is meant to optimize conversions, it seeks to convert users at a specific acquisition cost (cost of acquiring 1-customer). While setting this up, you need to indicate what a conversion is worth to your business. The ultimate aim here is to bring the CPA down over time.
• Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): In this, Google Ads will set your bids to maximize conversion value based on the return you seek on your ad spend. For example, if you want to generate $5 for every $2 spent, then by the formula [(sales/ad spend) x 100%], you get a ROAS of 250%