Targeting potential customers with Google Display ads with a thoughtfully defined budget is a smart way to raise awareness for your brand and improve future mid-to-lower funnel lead generation efforts. In order to leverage the power of the Google Display Network to benefit your company and your pipeline, you need to understand the whys, whats and hows of Google Display ads.
What is the Google Display Network?
Let’s start by exploring the more familiar Google Search ads, which get shown at the top and bottom of Google organic search engine pages. These are the ads you see when you run a search at google.com, usually three to four ads are shown above and below organic search results. By comparison, instead of showing up as a clickable link on a search engine result page (SERP), Google Display ads are shown on popular articles, videos channels, mobile apps or websites, properties that together make up the Google Display Network. According to Google, this network of approximately two million websites reaches over 90% of internet users worldwide. That casts quite a wide net for a much broader audience who have been identified as a possible target for your product or service offering than with Google Search ads.
Think about any of the times you’ve gone on to YouTube, read an online news or magazine article, checked the forecast on weather.com or clicked on a popular blog and saw ads pop up on the webpage. Yup, you’ve been targeted by my friend.
The Benefits of Google Display Ads
Google Search ads target chosen keywords and are best used for generating immediate leads. The goal of Google Display ads instead is to drive thought leadership and brand awareness. Google Display ads target a precise audience of customers earlier in the buying cycle while they’re browsing sites across the Google Display Network. Since they generate fewer immediate conversions than Google Search ads, they’re less expensive and your budget can stretch further.
Because the intention is to target the middle to upper part of the sales funnel, one of the biggest benefits of Google Display ads is increased brand awareness. Building customer recognition and brand authority with a wider audience helps companies acquire new clients in the future.
More importantly, these brand touchpoints are targeted at meticulously defined audiences. With Google Display campaigns, businesses can leverage tools that offer strategic audience targeting based on specific criteria such as interests and demographics. Refining your audience by their interests, age, gender and other criteria means your Google Display ads get shown to those who are likely to be interested in your products or services.
Target Your Audience by Their Interests
There are three different types of audiences you can develop based on interest targeting, also known as audience targeting: Affinity Audiences, Custom Affinity Audiences and In-Market Audiences.
Affinity Audiences:
An audience based on specific interests and/or hobbies
For example, if the product you’re looking to sell is online cooking classes to people that love food but have limited time on their hands, you might select the pre-designated affinity audience of: Food & Dining » Cooking Enthusiasts » 30 Minute Chefs.
Custom Affinity Audiences:
An audience based on specific interests and/or hobbies AND match criteria of chosen keywords, websites and apps
In this example, you choose interests most likely to resonate with your target audience’s: cooking, recipes, meal prep, health, baking
Then identify the websites they’re highly likely to visit (by URL):
Foodnetwork.com, epicurious.com, allrecipes.com
In-Market Audiences:
An audience composed of searchers actively looking for products and/or services similar to yours
Choose the category most applicable to your target customer interested in convenient online cooking classes, which in this case would be Home & Garden.
Target Your Audience by Their Demographics
You can also designate and exclude by predefined demographic categories outlined by Google. You can build a target audience based on the following demographic criteria: age, gender, household income and parental status.
If you know your customer base is mostly made up of middle-class parents with kids in elementary school who want to get back into homemade cooking, you’re able to quickly narrow down your audience based on these characteristics. You can do some quick research to determine the factors you may not immediately know such as income levels and age range (based on the common age of parents with kids in grades one through five).
Target An Audience with Remarketing
With remarketing, you can develop an audience containing those who have previously visited your website (on desktop or mobile) or interacted with your business. Creating this type of audience enables you to specifically tailor a message targeted at those who already know about your business but didn’t convert.
Consider reasons why your audience did not immediately decide to sign up for cooking classes after landing on your website, and tailor your messages to this subset of people: remind them about the benefits of your product, make a tantalizing offer or give them a free trial.
Why You Should Leverage Google Display Ads by Working with a Google Partner
Targeted advertising works when the message resonates with the right audience. In order to succeed with Google Ads, a company needs to have a good ad creative and offer, targeted at the right audience, at the right time. In essence, businesses should have a diverse ad strategy aimed at different layers of the sales funnel. This enables you to leverage the varying goals, intentions and audiences of both Search and Display campaign opportunities.
A Google Partner, certified by Google to manage Google Ads accounts for clients, can help you generate brand awareness, reach new audiences, retarget website visitors, increase brand touchpoints, boost leads, drive conversions and more with Google Ads. In addition, an authorized Google Partner can help develop and finetune your ad campaigns, all while strictly controlling costs based on your budget and using Google Analytics to measure success.
Supercharge Your Google Ads Campaigns Today
A well-planned ad campaign strategy complemented by Google Display ads can increase your brand recognition and lead flow with your targeted audiences. To realize the full power of Google Ads, contact the experts – reach out to a member of our team today and learn more about how a Google Partner can help develop and finetune your campaigns. Bleevit Interactive’s experts are ready to strategize, develop and finetune your Google Ads campaigns for maximum ROI – contact us today.
WRITTEN BY
Rick Hogan, CEO & Co-Founder – Bleevit Interactive Rick possesses over 20 years of digital marketing experience and started Bleevit Interactive with the primary mission of helping local businesses succeed online. When he is not working he can often be found hiking Great Falls, Virginia with his Labradoodle Lily, or sailing the Chesapeake Bay. If you have any comments or suggestions on how we can improve this post or otherwise want to give us a shout, send an email to [email protected].
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