Hit the Target with Your Display Ads
Re-marketing ads target consumers who have already shown interest in your products or services either by visiting a website or clicking on an ad before. Contextual campaigns serve ads to websites by matching keywords and content. Interest-targeting works to deliver ads either to consumers actively searching for products and services in your niche or people who have shown a history of interest in it. They are called in-market and affinity audiences, respectively. In terms of placement, you can let Google’s algorithms place ads for you or take manual control, but given the mass of data it can use to decide on your behalf, automation is easier and often more effective.
How to Prepare a Display Ad Campaign
A well-thought strategy based on clearly defined campaign goals, target audience, and keyword, placement, and display combinations will help to optimize the ROI from your display ad campaigns. Don’t expect to get all aspects right the first time. As with most advertising strategies, display ads take time, experimentation, analysis, and refinement to perfect.
Setting Display Ad Campaign Goals
Analyzing and tracking your ads’ performance is essential to an informed and effective campaign. So, at the outset you must define your goals. Do you need to increase awareness of your brand? Are you hoping to boost traffic to your web properties and landing pages? Would you like to see a direct impact on conversion rates, sales, and subscriptions?
Whatever you’re aiming for, start by bench-marking the status quo so you can later measure any changes arising from the campaign. Don’t forget to consider what your KPIs (key performance indicators) will be before you start and make sure they’re appropriate to the goals. If you want to measure a campaign’s impact on sales, for example, having CTR (click-through rate) as your KPI wouldn’t help, but it would be great for measuring how much traffic you’re driving.
Refine Your Display Ad Targeting Parameters
Segmenting your audience parameters is a useful way to help you focus your keyword research. Think about your target audience’s geographical location, social and financial status, and other demographics. It’s worth exploring social media, too, to see what questions and concerns they have that could give clues to engaging keyword and keyword phrase ideas.
