Google Display Ads Campaign Format

Advertising has evolved and come a long way in the last decade. In this digital era of technology, all businesses are shifting their attention online since their consumers are also online. Earlier it was newspapers that spread the news across regions and billboards used to be a major source of attraction. But now, smartphones are getting so advanced that they can compete against modern laptops easily and people tend to spend a major share of their time on them. So naturally, advertising agencies had to shift their focus to these power-packed tiny screens for reaching the maximum number of users. One of the most successful digital advertisement methods is display Ads from Google.

What is Google Display Ad?

The method of attracting the audience of a social media platform, website, or other digital media to take a specific action is known as display advertising. These are often made up of text-based, video or image advertisements that suggest the user click-through to a landing page and take some action that is favourable to the entity like making a purchase or subscribing. Google display ads are the visual-based ads you see while using a mobile app, watching a video on YouTube, or even reading an article on a blog. Standard Google display ads run across different Google properties and websites that are part of the vast Google Display Network that spans over 90% of the total internet users.

Google Ads has time and again proven to be an invaluable tool for many advertisers since they allow advertisers to target users who are specifically looking for the service or product they offer along with driving qualified traffic to sites. They are of the following types:

Responsive Display ads:  Ads on Google Display Network that is partially automated with responsive ads. Basically, Google will create the ad once you provide the ad text, images and logo. Improved performance can be expected since Google will optimize your ads & show as "native" ads that blend into the font and feel of the publisher's site.

Uploaded image ads: Ads that are created as images in different sizes or HTML5 and uploaded on Google account. You can upload ads.

Engagement ads: Engaging image and video ads across the Display Network that encourages users to click through.

Gmail ads: Expandable ads found at the top tabs of Gmail inboxes.

What format is used in Google Display Ads?

The universal components of an ad include parts like headlines, descriptions, CTAs and other factors that influence an ad like the competition, advertising goals and audience.

Some basic ad components are always going to be present, no matter what type of ad format you choose.

Headlines: The ad title is the first thing anyone notices. Headlines have the huge responsibility of enticing a consumer to click and explore more.

Sub-Headlines: They reinforce your brand message by adding more context and understanding to the headline.  

Description: The ad description reels in those individuals that the headlines hooked. They provide more space to sell your concept to consumers since the description of your ads is longer than the headlines.

URL and Landing Pages: The URL link that brings the users to your landing page is reviewed by Google, to see what the URL will look like to ad viewers and also the physical address of the landing page. It is a part of the ad experience and needs to be clean, short and to the point.

For a display ad with an image, the dimensions need to be 300X250 with a maximum file size of 150KB. Formats like .Gif, JPG, PNG & HTML5 are allowed with a duration limited to 30 seconds

For video ads, compatibility across all major browsers(Chrome 33+, Internet Explorer 10+, Firefox 25+ & Safari 6+) must be ensured by using both MP4 and either WebM or Ogg formats. The ad must be trimmed to fit the 30-second duration and must have the option to mute the video by users.

How to target using Google Display Ads?

The Google display Ads can reach anywhere and anyone across the globe. But to benefit from running a display ad campaign, you need to research parameters that can identify users that can become future customers and set your targeting preferences based on these parameters.

Targeting based on Interest: There are majorly 3 types

• Affinity Audiences:  includes almost 80 different groups based on hobbies or interests.
• Custom Affinity Audiences: allows creating groups of audiences using keywords that are specific to your business. The ads will be displayed to people visiting websites that contain these keywords.
• In-Market Audiences: helps to identify users who are actively looking at services or products that are similar to the ones your business offers.

Targeting based on demographics: targeting different demographics can bring varying results to your campaign. The market analysis done initially will help to understand which combination of factors need to be focussed on for effective targeting. Demographic targeting includes the following:

• Age: starting from 18 years to 65 or more.
• Gender: Female, Male or unknown
• Parental status: Whether the user is not parent, parent or unknown

These preferences can be set in the Google ads by going to the settings option in the Google Ads account. Different combinations of these factors need to be analysed to get a winning combination.

Best Practices for Google Display Ads Campaign

Unless you know what you are doing, the ROI from display ads will be minimal to nil and the cost incurred will mostly be huge. Changing from the default settings to a more customized one that suits your business needs is the first step towards a successful campaign.

1. Default Network Targeting

You have the default option to serve ads on both the Display Network and Search Network simultaneously via a single campaign when creating a Search Campaign in Google Ads. Although Search Partner sites can be beneficial for diversifying your ad to a broad global audience, adding these partners will cause a performance rate dip due to lowered click-through rates (CTR). This can increase your cost and also have a negative impact on your quality score. Besides, Search Partner Ads can take rake up the budget without conversions since they drive an enormous amount of clicks.

2. Default End Date of Campaign

One of the main reasons for budget waste is that the ad campaign doesn’t include an end date.

Plan when you’d like your ad to stop running and set an end date to have an idea of what total budget you have for the duration of your campaign.

3. Target Regional Language

If your target location doesn’t have English-speaking people, running ads in English will not yield much result. Target language strategically to reach the maximum amount of prospects.

4. Referral traffic

The referral traffic report tells you which websites are linking to yours the most and cater to people that could benefit from your product or service. These websites are the perfect places to serve the display ads since you are advertising to relevant audiences.

5. Bid Adjustments

You can make informed performance judgements, after running your display campaigns for a while, like which custom affinity audiences are doing poorly, which keywords are doing well, etc. You can set Bid adjustments at either the ad group or campaign level and it is a terrific way to boost your gains from top performers and cut your losses from poor performers.

In conclusion, Google display ads are still widely used because of their innate advantages. If you are unsure of successfully running a display ad, contact Intersmart Solution, one of the best digital marketing agencies in Cochin, Kerala to achieve the desired results from your Google display Ad campaign.