How to Build a Strong Google Display Ads Strategy

As I just mentioned, Google provides different ad formats to help businesses reach more customers and approach them from different angles. Display ads are a major part of the Google Ads package that’s arguably the most effective display advertising platform right now. Long gone are the days when Google was just a simple Internet search engine. The American mega-company has dozens of popular diverse services with billions of users all around the world.

From cloud services, email, and smartphones, to video sharing and online video game streaming, Google provides a diverse set of online services that truly make it an Internet deity. Interestingly, Google’s primary source of revenue is advertising. This comes from the fact that the company has also impressively integrated advertising across almost all of its popular services to take advantage of this gigantic user base. The result has been billions of dollars in revenue just from advertising.

The Google Display Network is a great example of how Google has managed to implement advertising in its services. This network consists of over two million different websites, apps, and services like YouTube and Gmail, which all could be hosts of your pre-built display ads. Have you seen those colorful banner ads on the websites you visit or when watching a video on YouTube? Those are Google Display Ads. As you could guess, GDN is huge, making it an incredible option to reach millions of people and generate massive brand awareness.

As you would expect from a company like Google, display advertising on this platform is highly automated, both in terms of finding and optimizing the audiences of campaigns and creating the ads themselves. It also provides advertisers with tons of actionable data and performance analysis to help them optimize their display campaigns even further.

You might wonder why you should adopt Google Display Ads in your marketing efforts. After all, Google also provides a paid search service which is a well-proven and massively popular advertising method. First of all, we’re not going to pick a clear “winner” between these two. Both Google Search Ads and Google Display Ads have their own characteristics and usages, so it’s better to know the differences between them and choose the one that suits your needs and goals better.

Advertising across the GDN is particularly great for prospecting and building brand awareness without emptying your pocket. It’s a visual experience that has a stronger impact on users in the long run compared to search ads. The average click-through rate for display advertising is considerably lower than search ads, meaning people are not going to click on your ads as much as you might expect, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing when you consider how display ads have a different function than search ads.

Display ads appear on places like websites and apps, where they’re not the point of focus, but more like secondary reminders that indirectly introduces your brand to viewers, or remind them of you and what you offer. Your average cost-per-click is lower with GDN since you’re no longer in fierce competition with advertisers over keywords. You can reach a wider audience and work with more than just a title and description. Having more control over branding is a strong advantage for Google Display advertising. On the other hand, with a search campaign, you’re targeting people who are actively seeking something you have, like a product or a service. The buyer intention is very high, and you have significantly more chance to convert prospects to customers quickly.

To get the most from your Google Display campaigns, you need a good display advertising strategy. Follow these tips and practices to shape your campaigns optimally and maximize results:

This is a practice that we definitely recommend not just for Google Display advertising, but for any time you want to run ads on a platform. Clearly identifying your goals and expectations helps focus your time and resources on things that matter and better assess your performance.

Think about what you want to achieve with your display ads. Is it generating incoming traffic to your website? Or gradually introducing your brand to new customers and making them aware of your brand? Once you define a goal for your campaign, you could better plan and implement it. For instance, you’ll know which target audience segment to pick, what tones to use in your ad copy, what creative assets would get better results, and how much you should bid.

Targeting the right audience accurately increases your chances of reaching your campaign goals and converting prospects into actual customers. Luckily, targeting in Google Display Ads is mostly automated, and fairly accurate thanks to Google’s powerful data processing systems and algorithms. But still, you could provide Google with additional “targeting signals” like keywords and audience segments to further enhance your campaign’s targeting and make sure your ads will be displayed to the right people.

If you’ve gained enough knowledge of your potential customers and have done enough customer research before, you could pick your targets manually. This could be done in various ways. You could filter your audience based on demographic or interests. You could also choose where you want your ads to be displayed. Google gives you the option to directly choose the websites where your ads will (or will not) appear, or pick hosts based on topics related to your business, product, or service.

The bottom of your marketing funnel should be one of your main focus points because that’s where you have the highest chance of converting a prospect into a customer. With proper remarketing, you’ll make sure you’re seizing every chance you have and enticing the people who already know your brand to buy from you. Google Display is perfect for remarketing to audiences who have shown an interest in your business but haven’t become a customer yet. The Dynamic Remarketing feature displays personalized ads for your audience based on a product feed or user’s previous visits to your website or app.

Google has significantly streamlined the process of creating visual ads for display campaigns with the Responsive Display Ads feature. In other words, you no longer have to create several ads in different shapes and sizes to fit every placement. All you need to do is provide Google with some assets and the system automatically generates ads for you.

You’ll have to provide some images, headlines, descriptions, and logos, and Google will use the best combination of them for each placement. Make sure your visual assets are appealing, attention-grabbing, and aligned with your brand’s visual identity. Your ad copy should also fit your audience’s characteristics and it’s better to invoke a sense of curiosity or urgency. Using a Google Display Ads spy tool is a great way to check how top advertisers design assets and write copies for their ads.

Your post-click landing page’s design and content are also very important, not just to maximize lead generation and conversion, but also for Google to favor your ads in auctions. It should be focused, informative, and straightforward without any confusion, false claims, or unnecessary jargon that might alienate customers.

Not Google Display Ads nor any other advertising method is a fire-and-forget approach. Google provides you with tons of different performance analytics and assessments, so make sure to use them in order to optimize your campaign and get the best possible results. Split test different assets, targeting filters, ad copies, topics, and keywords to find out which ones resonate better with your audience. This way, you’ll get rid of ads that only cost you money without getting acceptable results and maximize your ROI.