Campaign Targeting Options

Best Practices for Direct Response Campaigns

For direct response campaigns, the most important metric is cost-per-acquisition (CPA), or cost-per lead, which is primarily impacted by number of clicks the campaign receives and the conversion rate. By refining your campaign targeting options, you can send more qualified traffic to your site - increasing the chances of a visitor becoming a customer. Taking time upfront to set up your campaign correctly goes a long way in achieving this goal.

1.Create a separate Display Network campaign: Setting up a separate campaign just for the Display Network will allow you to have more control over keywords and bids than if the campaign were combined with Search. Select "relevant pages across the network" to maximize your reach. Include or exclude the Mobile Display Network depending on whether you are trying to reach people who are accessing your site through mobile devices.

2.Only reach potential customers: Target customers in the languages and geographic regions where you offer your product or service. Minimizing the number of people who see and click on your ad who are unable to purchase your product or service will help reduce your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and increase your conversion rate. Ad Scheduling and demographic targeting can also help to ensure that you're only reaching your target audience.

3.Use Keyword contextual targeting: Contextual targeting is best suited for driving performance and cost-efficient conversions. This targeting method will identify the most relevant pages where you ad is eligible to appear based on your keywords; showing your ad on sites where users are most likely to click.

4.Implement cost-per-click (CPC) bidding: Just like Search, this means you will only pay when a user clicks on your ad. CPC bidding is a must if you want to use Conversion Optimizer.

5.Create many, tightly themed ad groups: Multiple ad groups with clear themes, and a small tightly related set of keywords (5-50) enables AdWords to target your campaign more effectively on the Google Display Network. Use keywords that have one meaning and avoid duplicate keywords in the same ad group.

6.Include Negative keywords: This will prevent ads from showing on irrelevant themes that may be related to the keywords you are targeting, resulting in more qualified clicks.

7.Exclude irrelevant or poor-performing sites: You can get more qualified traffic by excluding sites that don't perform well for you based on historic data, or are irrelevant to your product.

8.Set up AdWords Conversion Tracking: Install Conversion Tracking on your website before you start a Google Display Network campaign, and create multiple conversion points across different pages of your site. This will give you more data to leverage when optimizing your campaigns, allowing you to understand whether you need to improve your campaign targeting or the conversion process on your site.

9.Use Conversion Optimizer to manage CPA: Google Conversion Optimizer automatically manages bids at the site level to reach a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid, which is the amount you're willing to pay for a conversion (such as a purchase or signup). When you enable the Conversion Optimizer for a campaign, you set a maximum CPA bid for each ad group.