What is the Display Network?

This is a collection of websites, apps, and other online properties where your ads can be placed to appear in front of your target market.

The Display Network includes Gmail, Youtube, Blogger, and Google Finance.

Determine Where Your Ads Appear

You can use a list of keywords within your display campaign to ensure that the web pages selected for your ads to appear on are related to the product or service that you provide.

You can also select topics, which are used by Google to help determine which websites are most relevant to your service. Afterwards you can select specific websites (using Placement Targeting) where you want your ads to appear and individual types of pages.

Lastly, with a Remarketing campaign you can show your ads to users who have visited your website before, but did not make a purchase the first time.

Whose Websites Are My Ads Appearing On?

The primary source of websites with placements for ads, come from Adsense publishers. These are website owners who allow ads to be displayed on their website in exchange for a fee from Google.

Choose Who Sees Your Ads

Select who will see your ad based on their demographics and interests. If you need to target women between the ages of 25 and 35 with an interest in fitness, you can adjust your campaign settings to achieve this.

How to Advertise to Your Audience

Engage and entice users using your own creativity. Your ads can come in the following ad formats:

Text Ads: Also known as “sponsored links”, these are the most basic ad format. They can be created directly within Adwords, and all you need to do is enter the text that you want to appear within your ad.

Image Ads: Image ads can be static or animated and will require you to either upload an image from your computer or to choose one from the Adwords Ad Gallery.

Video Ads: If you have created a video that advertises your product or service, this can be uploaded into the Adwords interface to be marketed to users within your ad.

Rich Media Ads: This ad type allows you to mix text, images, and video to create an interactive ad that engages the user. These can be created in the Adwords Ad Gallery.

How You Pay for Your Ads

Just as with the Search Network, advertisers bid against each other for ad placements, with each advertiser paying the minimum amount necessary to outrank the advertiser below them in the ranking.

There are three bidding options: you can bid for clicks (CPC), impressions (CPM), or based on a Cost-Per-Acquisition model.

CPC Bidding: This is ideal if your goal is to drive traffic to your website from your ads.

CPM Bidding: With this model you choose how many you pay per thousand impressions (CPM). For example if you are bidding £5 CPM, then you will pay on average £5 for every one thousand people who view your ads. This is ideal if your goal is to expose your brand or logo to as many users as possible.

CPA Bidding: This option requires historical conversion information, for example a contact form sign up, or a phone call conversion. If you have a lot of reliable conversion data within your campaign, and your goal is to maximise conversions, then this may be the best bidding option for you.

Very Effective When Used In-Conjunction with a Search Campaign

A study conducted by Google has shown that on average (median) advertisers will generate conversions through the display network at a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) that is 2% of the CPA of their Search campaign.

Campaigns for Generating Leads and Sales

The Google Display Network isn’t just useful for brand awareness campaigns, but can also generate sales and leads for your business. The main tool when achieving goals of this type is contextual targeting. This allows you to place your ads next to the most contextually relevant content on the web, at a time when users are at the business end of the buying cycle, are at their most engaged. For example if you’re website sells laptops, you can target users who have searched for the phrase “cheap laptops”, and choose to have your ads shown on laptop review sites, in order to maximise the chance of making a sale.

Setting Up Your Remarketing Campaign

Remarketing works by targeting users who have already visited your website. In order to do this, you need a list of individuals who have already come to your site, and this can be done by collecting cookies from people who have landed on a page of your site.

However depending on the goal of your website, you most likely do not want to market to literally everyone who has landed on your website. If the point of your site is to generate leads, then you do not want to market to users who have already given you their information.

If users go to a Thank You page after filling out your contact form – then a condition can be added so that these users are not included within the remarketing campaign. If users call the forwarding number on your website then this can also be tracked and used to exclude users who perform this action from the remarketing campaign.

By using a different remarketing code on each of the different product pages on your website, you can create different lists of users to remarket to. I.e. those who visited the blue widgets page can be served one ad type, while those who visited the red widgets page can be served another.