Optimizing Display Network Placements

Overview of Optimizing Display Network Placements

With managed placements, you choose individual websites within Google's Display Network where you'd like your ads to appear. To use managed placements most effectively, make sure the content of the placements is relevant to the ads in that ad group.

Here are some optimization strategies for managed placements:

• Use only relevant placements. The right placements will help you find potential customers interested in exactly what you're advertising. To reach additional traffic, use the Placement Tool to find placement ideas that are relevant to your campaign.
• Delete poorly-performing placements. Placements that have not performed well for you might need to be deleted. By deleting the placements that aren't bringing you qualified traffic, you can eliminate irrelevant impressions on your ads and improve your Quality Score. In addition, you may want to exclude specific placements if you want to target the Display Network as a whole.
• Use sites that are compatible with your ad. Make sure that the placements you select will accept the ad formats and sizes that you plan to run. For example, if you want to run image ads in a letterbox format, make sure that you've selected relevant placements that support that ad format and size.
• Use the most effective bidding strategy. Placement-targeted ads can use cost-per-click (CPC) pricing or cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) pricing. CPC is generally preferred by advertisers concerned with clicks and who ultimately value clickthroughs to their website. CPM is generally preferred by those who are brand-focused and want visibility across the Web. Note that to use CPM bidding, your campaign must target the Display Network only. You can also increase your Display Network bids to help show your ad more often on the Display Network.
• Experiment with different bids. To improve the position of your ads, you can try increasing the maximum CPM or CPC bid for individual placements that perform well for you. Along with your ad's quality, a higher maximum bid can help your ads appear more often on your selected placements.
• Assign destination URLs. Placement-level destination URLs send users to a specific landing page. This can help make sure that potential customers are taken to the exact page within your website that's most relevant to the content on that placement.
• Group your placements by theme. Review your placements and look for themes within the overall list. Consider creating separate ad groups with highly specific ads for each of these smaller groupings. The more precisely you target your audience, the better chance of success your ad will have.
• Combine with keywords. Mixing placements with keywords in the same ad group can be a good way to refine Display Network campaigns. Your keywords determine whether or not your ads can appear on a placement you've chosen. Therefore, make sure that your keywords are relevant to your specific placements. If you add negative keywords to an ad group with placements, your ads will be less likely to appear on placements about the negative topics you've entered.

With automatic placements, your keyword list will determine which placements on the Display Network will show your ads. To optimize where your ads can automatically show on the Display Network, focus on your keyword lists and ad text.

Here are some optimization strategies for automatic placements:

• Use relevant keywords. The AdWords system always starts by looking through every possible page in the Google Display Network to find placements that match your keywords. Only the pages that match your keywords can show your ads. Therefore, it's very important to only use keywords that are highly relevant to your business, product, or service.
• Group keywords by theme. A placement is chosen based on its relevance to your entire ad group's keyword list. To optimize your performance on the Display Network, make sure your keywords share the same theme, such as describing the same product or service. If you have keywords describing several themes or products (such as roses and gift baskets, or hotels in Paris and hotels in Hawaii), separate them into different ad groups.
• Write ads that match your keywords. Your ad text is not taken into consideration when automatic placements are chosen for you. However, it's important for your overall success that your ad text matches the same theme as its corresponding keyword list. If your keyword list's theme is wedding bouquets, your ad will likely be placed on a site about that topic, so you won't want to show an ad about Valentine's Day bouquets.