Are your AdWords search ads doing wonders for you business? Great! Should you leave it at that and not worry about a display marketing campaign? Nope. Have display ads underperformed for you in the past? Whatever your scenario, if you’re seeing healthy conversions from your search campaigns, you’re clearly doing something right. Display ads have morphed into much more than pesky banners. Relevant, targeted and focused campaigns are resulting in impressive conversions and huge boosts in audience and brand engagement.

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We’re not going to enter into the never-ending debate over which AdWords Campaign types are best, there’s no definitive answer. It’s a different journey for every business. When designed, set up, considered, executed and tracked correctly, any AdWords campaign can be extremely valuable. Setting up an attention-grabbing display marketing campaign with display remarketing, may be just the added boost your brand needs. Before you start you need to be aware of what not to do.

‍AdWords Display Marketing Campaign Mistakes:

‍1. Not clearly identifying your target market

2. Failure to define your campaign goals and purpose

3. Incorrect set-up

4. Making your campaign too broad

5. Poor landing page strategy – not in line with your ad content.

6. Not tracking conversions and ignoring analytics.

‍What to do before you start

‍Define the purpose of your ad. Are you presenting a new product? Would you like to boost brand awareness? What do you want people to do after clicking your ad? Download an eBook? Subscribe to your mailing list? Make a purchase?

Identify who your target audience is (and isn’t). You need to create a buyer persona based on location, demographic, and websites your targets visit. You also need to identify the keywords related to your product or particular ad offering, and the keywords that would lead Google to your business type. Consider where you definitely DO NOT want your display ad to appear. Creating an audience list through Google Analytics.

‍Display Network Targeting Methods

The Google Display Network (GDN) offers sophisticated targeting options that allow you to present your business on relevant websites, in order to reach your ideal target audience. You might choose to exclude your ad placement from mobile games to avoid accidental toddler clicks. You might want your ad to be excluded from pages by category of crime/police or emergency, or sexual content. Learn about display ads for B2B marketers.

‍Targeting types Include:

• Placement Targeting
• Interest Targeting
• Audience Targeting
• Topic Targeting
• Demographic Targeting

Exclusion types Include:

• Site Category Exclusion
• Display Targeting Exclusion (including keyword, placement interest, audience, topic and demographic)

How To Set Up A Display Marketing Campaign And Display remarketing

1. Ok. Let’s get stuck in. Click + Campaign and choose ‘Display Network only’. Name your campaign.

2. Choose an appropriate marketing objective, or opt to define your objectives yourself. If you’re new to AdWords, choosing a marketing objective can be helpful; but we’re going to define our objectives ourselves. Highlight ‘No Marketing objective,’ and ‘all features’.

3. Using the locality decided by creating your buyer persona, choose the locations you want to target, or exclude, and confirm language settings.

4. Set your all-important budget. Manual: Set your own maximum Cost Per Click daily budget. Bid Strategy: Display network ads are often presented to users as they’re going about their online day, rather than performing a search related to your campaign. Therefore, CTR’s are often lower. Display network bidding allows you to set a max CPC bid for clicks on the Display Network. There are several bid strategies to suit different campaigns. Considerations include the networks you’re targeting, and whether your goal is to achieve views, clicks, impressions or conversions from your display ad.

Bidding strategies for four basic goals:

Cost Per View (CPV Bidding): If you’re running video display ads and want to increase views.

‍Cost Per Click (CPC Bidding): May be ideal for you if your goal is to generate traffic to your website.

‍Cost Per Thousand Viewable Impressions (vCPM): Impressions count when your campaign is focused on increasing brand awareness, rather than driving traffic or consumer action.

‍Smart Bidding: When you want customers to take a direct action on your site. Leverage conversion tracking, and choose the smart bidding strategy that aligns with your objectives (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise Conversions, or Enhanced CPC).

The next section gives you options on ad extensions and adjusting some of the advanced settings. These settings are very business and campaign specific. It’s great to experiment with various options once you’re feeling AdWords comfortable. Small adjustments can make a huge difference to you ROI.For the purpose of this guide, we’ll choose Manual CPC and skip extensions and advanced settings for now.

Setting Up Remarketing

Visit this step by step guide to creating a remarketing list with Google Analytics

‍5. next we set up the targeting for our ad. Name the ad group and nominate a CPC bid. Choose interests and remarketing from “Choose how to target your ads.”

6. In “select a category” choose “remarketing lists.”

7. If you’ve followed our guide to creating a remarketing list with Google Analytics, you should be able to choose from your available audience lists.Alternatively, to create your remarketing tag and lists through AdWords, click “set up remarketing” and follow the prompts.

Display Ad Design

You can choose text ads for the display network; but we’re going to discuss an image ad. If you have a killer creative team who has already designed you a clickable, convertible, impression-worthy ad, just upload it. If you’re a little design challenged; but are taking the DIY approach, visit an easy to use drag and drop design site like canva to create professional looking ads. Make sure you follow the image size specifications very closely to ensure your images are sized and formatted correctly.

Creating An Engaging Adwords Display Ad

The best rule of thumb for any advertisement design is that it should be simple, visually appealing, easy to read, and well branded. Your design needs to resonate with your buyer persona and should match the look and feel of your website, while getting your message across in an engaging and concise way. If you’re stumped, try the “view ad ideas” option in AdWords. You enter your URL, and based on content from your website, Google will generate some design ideas for you. Some of them are not half bad either. If you find one you like, you can edit and adjust the elements to your hearts content.

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