Looking to improve your direct response campaign on the Google Display Network but not sure where to start?
Good news, you’re in the right place! And, we can help you get better results from your campaign!
The following 4 techniques will breathe fresh air into any stagnant campaign and improve performance in less than a week.
1.) Refresh your Digital Marketing Creative Regularly
Refreshing your creative is one of the most overlooked, and most important, things you can do to increase the performance of your ads. Since most of the websites on the Google Display Network, or GDN, are light, or white, in color, changing the color of your ads so that they are not white or grey can help to highlight your ad. Even adding a thin border around the ad, especially if it is white, can be an easy way to lift the ad off of the page and make it stand out a bit more.
What about your call to action? Strong CTA (call to action) text with an associated button can make a huge difference as to whether your ad is clicked or not. Make sure your CTA message is clear and that the color and placement of any CTA button stands out from the rest of your creative.
Simply refreshing your creative can give you a large bump in CTR and conversions. Make sure to always include the 3 most important sizes, 300 X 250, 160 X 600 and 728 X 90px and to refresh your creative every 2-3 months.
2.) Set up Placement Filters for Relevant Impressions
As with any type of advertisement, you want to make sure that you’re targeting your ads to relevant audiences. To adjust the placement of your ads, you’ll need to:
- Go to the display network tab within your campaign
- Select placements
- Click the drop down box for filter and select create filter
- Add a filter for impressions equal to or over 2,500 impressions which will look like this >= and select
- Add another filter for both conversions < 1 and view through conversions < 1
- Save your filter and run this every other day or so. On bigger budgets and campaigns, you may want to run this every day depending on your volume
- Select the boxes of the placements that are getting a ton of impressions but aren’t converting, select edit and exclude from ad group
- Depending on how many impressions you get per day this is a great place to start. Done!
3.) Adjust Your Campaign Structure for Greater Reach
If you have interests, topics and keywords all setup within the same ad group, you are severely limiting your impressions. By having these different keyword and interest targeting types in the same ad group you require websites to contain the keywords you targeted and match the interest. Not only does this violate Google best practices, but it narrows your reach and impressions.
To make these simple adjustments you’ll first need to separate your ad groups based on the type of targeting and closely related themes. We’d suggest having a keywords ad group for a tightly themed group of keywords, an interest ad group for each interest you want to target and topics in their own separate ad groups as well. This will prevent your ads from being limited and expand the reach of your campaign. This setup will also make it easier to see what is performing best for you in the main campaign interface screen.
4.) Add Demographic Targeting to Improve Conversions
If you can look at your campaign and determine which demographics are converting and those that are not, making some adjustments will definitely help improve your results. Instead of casting a wide net you should really be focusing on a target audience that will ultimately convert. These changes will help ensure dollars aren’t wasted on non-converters and give you more bang for your buck in higher-performing placements. To make these changes, you’ll need to:
- Under the display network tab in your campaign, select demographics
- Take a look at which users are converting with your ads
- For example, if male and unknown are the top converters and the CPA (cost-per-acquisition) is half that of female, then disable females for the campaign
- Follow this same rule for ages and parental status
Your direct response campaign in the GDN needs your attention. Without regular assessment and updates you could end up wasting your marketing budget. But, when you’re able to focus on proper targeting, the Google Display Network can prove to be a valuable resource in creating quality leads.
