How to achieve the best results with Google multimedia ads?

Millions of dollars are invested in Google Display Network every day, and Google provides marketers with many options to promote their products. So what is the difference between Google multimedia ads and other ads?

This article will explore what using Google display ads can do for us, how GDN differs from search ads, and how to position your GDN ads in the right places to attract the right people.

Google Display Ads

GDN is a great option when search engines from industry competitors are overcrowded. With it, there will be less competition for bidding on popular keywords, so you are more likely to reach users who are actively searching for your products and services. While the audience intent isn’t as strong, you can get lower CPCs and more impressions.

In Google keyword bidding ads, the GDN indicator can record and analyze visitor volume and click frequency. Marketers often ignore the GDN indicator during keyword bidding ranking, but making good use of the GDN indicator will bring unexpected gains.

Google Display Advertising is a series of websites that can display Adwords ads, including specific Google websites such as Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger and YouTube. The network also includes mobile sites and apps. Display ads can reach a wide range of customers, and the format and location of ads on different websites may vary.

GDN Value

The value of GDN comes down to accessibility and affordability. In traditional search advertising, prospecting, increasing brand awareness, and remarketing can come with high advertising costs. In contrast, the GDN avoids a lot of expensive competition from other networks, and you can also target your custom audiences in many different ways.

With Google search ads, you’re essentially casting a wide net that covers a large portion of your target customers and how they spend money. Google Display Ads, on the other hand, allows you to define your audience in ways that search engines cannot.

Since you can target more than just keywords, you’re not limited to just the Google search results page. The GDN allows you to target sites by audience interest, market segment, and custom intent keywords. You can even choose website placements that are tailored to your target audience.

A key distinction here is that the user's primary interest is the website content itself, and display ads play an indirect, secondary role in the website's appeal to users. Marketers want potential users to see their GDN ads while they are in the process of achieving another goal. This makes user intent different from the high-intent search phrases for which ads appear at the top of Google results pages.

Unlike search, with a network of millions of websites, there are many more targeting options besides keywords. You can reach most of the internet users through website placements. The primary goal of the GDN is to find the right audience size through strict targeting criteria.

Prospecting or remarketing?

On the GDN, you can target in two ways. First, you can target potential customers on the internet who may not know anything about your website, brand, products, or services. Second, you can remarket in some form to users who have interacted with your website. The second allows you to leverage the audiences you find for your website in Google Analytics. If you don’t have any Google Analytics website audiences built, simply set up an audience for users who complete a specific action.

Most common remarketing audiences

• General website visitors
• User who submitted the form
• Users who downloaded the content
• Users who viewed a specific product page
• Users who have registered for an account or trial offer
• Users who have completed transactions or purchased products
• Users who completed any of the above actions but abandoned the page before completing

Remarketing and exploration are two very different programs you can run through the GDN. Some businesses prefer to focus solely on remarketing, as reaching users who are familiar with their products drives sales at the most affordable cost. However, some businesses are more concerned with the visibility of their products and services rather than returns.

Therefore, we need to remind everyone here that no matter which positioning method you choose, it should be guided by your own marketing goals.

Explore and enhance brand awareness

Show ads to your audience based on their interest categories. Interest targeting can be broken down into the following categories: audiences with purchasing intent, audiences with similar interests, and defined audiences, depending on the advertising goal and the specific stage of the customer's purchase process.

1. Audience with purchasing intention

In-market audiences are Google users interested in products and services across a broad range of categories, including real estate, education, home and garden, sports and fitness, and more. Google defines these in-market audiences based on a user's historical views, clicks, and conversions on previous content.

Each niche specific genre has subcategories, each of which can easily reach millions, sometimes billions, of users.

Control the size of your in-market audience by comparing with Google Analytics data. Google Analytics will show you which in-market audiences on your site have the highest conversion rates. Google Analytics has the power to identify and build data-driven audiences from which Google Ads can learn and optimize. Ultimately, using Google Analytics can help you acquire high-quality users.

2. Affinity Audiences

Like in-market audiences, affinity audiences are Google users with similar interests, including cooking, fashion, beauty, gaming, music, travel, and more. These are very broad categories of internet users, so it’s equally important to find targeting criteria to narrow down the size of any affinity audience or its subcategories.

Relying strictly on the default options in segmentation and affinity audiences in Google Ads can significantly cut into your marketing budget. Google Analytics can help you understand exactly which affinity audiences convert the most on your website.

3. Custom Audiences

Custom audiences are another valuable contextual targeting method. Simply put, Google can show your ads to users who “may be interested in specific keywords and website URLs.” It may also show your ad to people who have recently searched for your recommended keywords.

The main difference between custom intent audiences and other targeting methods is that you’re not targeting websites using those exact keywords, and Google isn’t placing your ads specifically on the specified website URLs. Instead, Google will serve your ad to users on other websites that have some contextual relationship to the website URL or keywords provided by Google.

4. Display location positioning

When you provide a placement URL, Google can show your ad on a specific website. This option provides tighter, more controlled targeting because it limits ad placement to custom sites selected by the marketer.

Users who visit your website may also visit other websites. With custom affinity (interests) and custom intent (keyword and URL) audiences, Google can target these users to other online sites. Portraying the site you specify as the center of a digital spider web, Google uses the central URL to locate users at other URLs within the spider web, expanding your reach to include sites you might not have known about.

Managed placement targeting is to specifically select certain web pages in the display network for targeting. For example, a group of ads is delivered to Yahoo, YouTube, etc. This type of delivery has two major flexible features:

(1) Manage ad placements flexibly and autonomously (you can use system recommendations and placement tools to select high-quality web pages and add them manually)

(2) Flexible bidding based on the performance of ads in different display positions

5. Theme Positioning

Google can show your ad only on web pages about the topics you specify. This positioning is an alternative to researching and selecting website placements for an interest without knowing the impact of those placements.

Target and place advertisements based on the content themes of various websites in the multimedia network. This type of advertising is suitable for attracting traffic, gaining a wide audience, or cooperating with certain themed activities on the site. It also applies to limiting the display of ads on web pages with certain specific topics.

The conversion effect of this type of advertising is relatively poor compared to other display ads. This type of advertising is not suitable for delivery that focuses on increasing conversion rates or conversion goals.

Three Key Audience Building Factors

Now that you understand your target audience and the basic mechanics of creating audiences, we can dive into three essential tips to ensure you can do a better job of building those audiences.

1. Choose the right equipment

When setting up an advertising campaign, it is important to consider where your target audience will use the product and how they will sign up. If the user experience is affected or not as good on a specific device, consider excluding that device entirely.

2. Choose the right demographic and location

Google allows you to customize multiple demographics when targeting your display campaigns. For example, age and household income are divided into seven different ranges. If you know your audience isn’t in the 18-24 age range, or in the top 10% by household income, you can easily exclude those users when creating your ad groups.

There may also be some states in the U.S. or international locations where your business is reluctant to drive sales. You can easily adjust bids for these locations and shift your budget toward more profitable locations.

3. Mark the content exclusion in the box

It's easy to miss the additional setup of browsing sites with clear content before launching your campaign on the GDN. Some advanced content settings can be used to prevent your site from appearing on sites with sensitive social issues. By default, Google does not mark these boxes, so they must be checked manually to prevent your ads from appearing on unwanted websites.

Tips for optimizing GDN

Now that we’ve learned about targeting methods and specific audience building factors, let’s dive into how to optimize your GDN results.

1. Evaluate demographic performance and recalibrate

Some of your audience demographics may be ideal for traditional marketing but may not perform well in a digital environment. Even after setting specific demographic and geographic targeting, it’s important to examine the performance of content that wasn’t excluded. For example, there are some demographic categories (e.g., “Unknown”) and ages (e.g., “65+”) that may become expensive after release.

2. Evaluate placement performance and analyze improvements

Google makes it easy to see where your ads are showing on a daily or weekly basis after your campaign launches. You can find this information under "Where your ads are showing." Filtering placements by unusually high spend or CTR will quickly identify sites that pose a direct threat to the health of your campaign.

A reminder here is to block duplicate placements that don't produce any results, because duplicate ad placements take priority over sites where only one impression appears. After identifying duplicates, check the relevance of those sites, how much money they spend, and whether they generate conversions.

3. Consider the best advertising style and placement

There are two main ad types for GDN campaigns: standard image ads and responsive ads . Standard image ads come in a variety of formats, including square, rectangle, skyscraper, and banner. These ads are image-only display options.

Responsive ads, on the other hand, offer a combination of text and image options, displayed in a variety of formats, depending on where the ad is displayed. A complete ad consists of three image types, up to five short headlines, one long headline, up to five descriptions, and a business name. Short titles and descriptions rotate and the best performing combination is displayed.

With limited time, budget, or creative resources, it can be difficult to fully understand which multimedia ads will work best for your campaign, and you may not want to risk spending time testing different display ads. If this is the case, note that the 300×250 and 728×90 formats can get more impressions than other ad formats. In addition, half-page ads and large rectangular ads also have higher click-through rates.

You can gather a very strong reach on the Google Display Network with the right focus on targeting.

Whether you’re just getting started or have some room for improvement, check out the Custom Audiences feature to see if you can create better results for your next campaign.

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