3 Tips To Kick-Start Your Display Network Campaign

A few months ago I was having a conversation with a client about different strategies we could use to grow their conversions and traffic. As a full service digital media agency, we talked over a few different options that they were interested in testing, but when I mentioned display advertising I was met with a gasping “no, we definitely don’t want to do that!” It’s not the first time I’ve heard a response like this and, realistically, it probably won’t be the last.

We’ve run a lot of display campaigns with great success, so it always comes as a surprise when I hear people knock the quality of traffic that comes through. This last response I received prompted me to write up this blog post on how to get the most out of your Display Network campaigns. My aim is to help everyone see that you can get results – as long as you’re running things properly.

Before Going Live

Running a successful Display campaign can heavily depend on how well prepared you are, even before you receive your first impression. At Flight Digital there are 3 things that we believe have a big impact on performance:

1. Negative Placements – Adding negative placements as you optimise a campaign is obviously important (we’ll touch on this shortly), but one placement you should avoid is adsenseformobileapps.com. This placement allows your ads to show on all mobile phone and tablet apps, and there are many apps out there designed specifically to generate revenue from display ads. Whilst these placements can rack up a lot of clicks, really fast, they can also wipe out your entire budget before you can say, “Where’d my budget go?” The most important thing to note about these placements is that they generate a huge number of accidental clicks, meaning your likelihood of generating conversions is slim to none.
2. Managed Placements – On the flip side, before you set your campaign live it’s a good idea to research and find popular sites in your industry that accept display ads. The more you can find the better. You can tell Google that you want to target these sites regardless of their content and/or when the content meets your target keywords. A lot of the time these placements will reach your most targeted users and deliver the best click through and conversion rates.
3. Split Test Ads – Far too often will advertisers launch a display campaign with 1 variation of ad creative. A trait that all successful advertisers will have is that they test their ads, and do so frequently. There are various ways of testing, such as: using different call to actions, images, background colour, button colours, static vs. animated ads, and the list goes on. You’ll always find that 1 version will outperform the other in conversion or click through rates.

How To Optimise For Improved Performance

I mentioned earlier that I would expand on finding new negative placements as the campaign collects traffic and data. We all know (I hope) that running regular Search Query Reports on a search campaign is vital to finding new keyword opportunities and also finding new negative keywords for the account. This practice should be no different with all of your Display campaigns – “but how do I see search queries if there are no searches on the Display Network?” Good question! Follow the steps below and you’ll find a list of domains and URL’s that your ad has been appearing on.

1. In your Display campaign, click on the ‘display network’ tab

2. Next, you will need to click on the ‘placements’ tab

3. You will then see all the domains that your ads have been appearing on. However, this doesn’t give you the full picture. You want to be able to find the actual URL’s your ads have been appearing on so that you can inspect them and determine if the content is relevant to your campaign. To get this level of data select ‘see details’ > ‘all’. This will show you a list of all the URL’s where your ad has been served.

You can now easily see where most of your Display budget is going and where your conversions are coming from. So what do you do with this data now? You can start to take certain URLs, or domains, and add them as negative placements. Something else we like to do is take the domains that are performing well and add them as new placements. Doing this will give you the best chance of showing on those domains more frequently, resulting in more conversions.

Lastly, if we find a placement that is driving a healthy amount of traffic and conversions, we contact the site owner directly and ask if we can buy a placement directly through them. We sometimes end up with cheaper traffic and 100% share of voice on that site.

Start Slow

Often advertisers allocate a set budget for each channel and wait to see how they all perform. They then make changes few months down the track. If this is your first run at the Display Network, we always suggest to start with a test budget and then make increases as you start to generate results. Sometimes Display Campaigns will take some time to really step into gear, so you want to make sure that you are gathering data, analysing, optimising, and then increasing budgets.

We hope these quick tips can help you get started on the right foot with your next Display Campaign!