Optimize and Refine

The Value of Optimizing

Optimization can help you achieve your goals for your display campaigns by improving the quality and performance of your account. The optimization strategies featured throughout this lesson have been designed to help you identify and address areas of opportunity within your campaigns.

Identifying where you may be able to make improvements to your display campaigns will help you understand how to maximize your success on the Google Display Network. Best practices around ad group expansion, keyword expansion, and placement targeting can help you expand your reach without sacrificing relevance. You can also identify areas that may be performing relatively well, but could benefit from further refinement through additional targeting options such as adding negative keywords, implementing site and category exclusions, and refining your ads and keywords to be more tightly themed.

Reviewing Google Display Network Campaigns

When to Make a Change

Before making any significant changes to new display campaign, it's important that you've given it enough time to establish and accrue performance history. Doing so will help you understand the full potential of your display campaign performance and allow you to decide on whether or not changes are necessary.

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when reviewing and making changes to your new display campaign:

Week 1 of Campaign Launch

•Immediate Monitoring: Check within a day after you launch your new campaign to make sure it's active and accruing impressions and clicks.

•Correct Your Targeting: Within two to three days, check the Networks tab to exclude sites and add negative keywords to correct straight-forward cases of poor targeting matches. An example of poor targeting would be "bra" ads appearing on sites about "Bra, Italy."

•Check Setup Consistency: If you notice a large number of clicks but little or no conversions, check your ad creative and your landing page to make sure they are well-matched. For example, if you are a furniture store that is selling sofas, be sure that your landing page directs users to the section of your website that features sofas instead of sending them to the general furniture homepage. You should also verify that your conversion code is set up correctly. Try generating a conversion yourself and then check your account to see if the conversion was recorded.

Week 2 + of Campaign Launch

•Wait For Critical Mass of Data: Before making significant changes, such as changing bids, excluding additional sites, or pausing ad groups, wait until enough click or conversion data has accrued. Before making significant changes, consider waiting until your campaign has accrued five or more conversions and 100 or more clicks per site. If you are focused on metrics other than conversions, you should wait until enough volume (impressions) has accrued.

•Evaluate Performance Regularly: Once you have everything in place, be sure to check your campaign performance periodically to ensure that it is still performing to your satisfaction.

Refining Google Display Network Performance

Using Google Display Network Controls

There are several methods for refining the performance of your display campaigns on the Google Display Network.

•Negative Keywords: Negative keywords are a great way to help prevent your ads from showing on Display Network pages with irrelevant themes. Choosing your negative keywords carefully can effectively limit the number of untargeted clicks and impressions received by your display campaign and improve your return on investment (ROI).

•Site and Category Exclusion: Site and category exclusion allows you to exclude irrelevant sites or topics that you do not want your ad to appear on in the Google Display Network. You may choose to utilize exclusions once you've gained an understanding of where your ads are appearing (likely through the use of Placement Performance Reports), and how they're performing on those placements. Once you have an idea of the types of sites or topics that you want to exclude, you can go directly to the Site and Category Exclusion Tool to apply these exclusions to your campaign. Advertisers who choose to not show up on a particular type of content (e.g. video sharing sites, social networks, etc), can proactively exclude specific sites or categories of sites before their campaign launches. Site and category exclusions can also be modified once the campaign is live.

•Refining Keywords: When contextually targeting, creating tightly themed keyword lists will help to ensure that your ads are appearing on relevant sites within the Google Display Network. Having a large keyword list with general keywords may cause your ads to show up on irrelevant sites that seem related to your business, but really aren't (such as an ad for "java" coffee showing up on a JavaScript site). Refining your keywords to be more specific will help you target the right types of sites.

Extend Your Reach

Expanding on already successful strategies can help you to extend the reach of your display campaign's performance. Here are a few techniques to consider when optimizing for reach:

•Expand on successful ad groups: Take a look at all of your ad groups from within your display campaign and identify those that are the meeting your campaign objectives. For ad groups that are performing well, consider expanding into additional ad groups that are related to those themes. Use the Wonder Wheel tool to help you with finding related themes to target.

•Increase bids for successful sites: For sites where your display ads are performing under your target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goals, consider raising your bids on these sites to maximize placements of your ads. You can also decrease bids on sites that are not meeting your campaign objectives. You can identify sites that are performing well, in addition to those that are performing poorly, by generating a Placement Performance Report (PPR) for your display campaign or reviewing this information directly through the Networks tab in your AdWords account (under the "Auto placements" section).

•Expand on successful sites: If you are using placement targeting, review all of your site performance and identify sites that are doing well for you. Consider expanding your success by targeting other similar sites. Use the Ad Planner to help you with finding sites to target.