Question

Anyone cracked Google Display yet? What kind of ads work for you? (Image ads or responsive; Stock images or amateur Images; angles) What targeting do you use? Do you use a short content between ad and landingpage or do they go directly to the landingpage? What do you exclude? Like converters, apps, topics. We had a phase when it was really good, couple of years back, now nothing seems to work with all the changes google made  would be cool to get some input on what else there is to try.  

Answer 1

Yep. GDN still works great in certain niches. Especially for mass appeal offers. Image ads almost always outperform responsive for me. Responsive ads seem to open up all the click farm sites. So you have to get really aggressive with excluding the fraud placements early on. Still don’t know why google doesn’t take care of this. Overall, you want to bid manual cpc initially and optimize to your cpa goal. Then flip to cpa bidding to get scale.  

Comments

@rosenda we know of a couple of placements that worked in the past (leads for 8€). If I replicate that setting and run the same type of ads, I am not even getting close. I dont really had many issues with fraud placements. What worked for us were keywords + image ads (excluding google. anonymous, which doesnt work anymore I think and apps) with manual cpc.  

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@polecat keyword targeting is always my first target on the GDN. The “fraud” sites are all the templated Wordpress sites with spun content. Pretty deceptive, but you’ll start to spot them after a while. Also, there’s tons of bogus TLDs you have to exclude and wade through (. info, . xyz, . ru, etc. ). If you’re not seeing results, I’d definitely get aggressive with blocking these types of placements.  

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@rosenda how do you exclude domains?  

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@rosenda very cool. Gonna bookmark this. Thx!  

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@rosenda I'm curious, what do you have for landing pages and what are you counting as a conversion? A form fill out, a sale?  

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@receiver4 GDN is best for mass appeal types of offers. Ecomm can work, but it can really shine for lead gen.  

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@rosenda I understand. I was curious though, what offer are you using it for then? What landing pages are you using and what are you counting as a conversion. It would be helpful to know how your measuring success and how you're applying GDN for that.  

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@receiver4 lead gen offers. See ESurance, LendingTree, CreditCards. com, HomeAdvisor, AngiesList, Bankrate etc. a conversions is someone that enters their information looking to take the next step.  

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It is called GCN now :) because naming is important to google, but not having properly trained employees

Answer 2

All ads formats and all targeting methods work; or at least you must test all of them to find out which work and which don’t. We have some campaigns where text ads are killing it with keyword targeting, some with responsive ads and similar audiences, some banners and custom affinity, etc - you get the idea

Answer 3

There are exactly 4 campaign subtypes out of 10 that work very well and you need an external Software to get Infos to feed into your Display. Or it will just spam. I mean you want real big roi on this? If your remarketing lists are crap forget about it too.  

Comments

We arent going for remarketing this time around though

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@stockman Could you elaborate on which campaign types and which software?  

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@discontent/activity" class="qa-user-link">discontent Hi @discontent/activity" class="qa-user-link">discontent sorry, i am giving out a lot of insides and secrets. But that would be giving away the core of years of experience ;).  

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@stockman I get it  

Answer 4

What greif says is right, but if you don't know "the placement trick", the best ads and keyword don't help.  

Answer 5

I run 3 types of display campaigns (Mobile banners - Other GDN sizes- GDN Re-marketing) include responsive ads in GDN, they’re getting me the most conversions so far. Don’t use smart display campaigns they’re useless. try to include all the image sizes in your campaign eventually you’ll see which are working best.  

Answer 6

GDN is garbage, FB is where its at for display. Seriously, whens the last time you took notice of a banner ad on a website and thought 'oh yes please! ' lol

Comments

@tims434 I agree, the GDN does have a lot of garbage. I don’t know why google doesn’t just clean it up. But after you wade through the garbage, the scale is immense, and quality is solid. It dwarfs what you can spend on FB in a day with solid ROI. Yes, people still click on display ads. The GDN includes traditional display, YouTube, GMail, mobile apps. Each of which have billions of daily impressions. It will take some spend to figure out each piece, but once you do.  

Answer 7

"Works" in what way? Main purpose and super power of GDN (if there's any) is branding, not performance (except retargeting). So, difficult to measure.  

Comments

@rosebud yeah. But animated gifs aren’t that difficult to create in Photoshop or similar. Just a little movement on CTA or text is all you need. For some reason, animated gifs way outperform animated HTML5 ads — which are a lot more difficult to create. What’s great about the GDN is the lack of ad fatigue. I have several ads that I created 5 years ago still running and pulling conversions. Crazy.  

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"Just a little movement on CTA or text is all you need. ": Interesting. We use to invest in more complicated movements. Will test it. And YES, the eternal youth of display (and search) ads in the Google Ads universe is one of the nicest phenomens here. When the audience renews itself automatically, no need to hectically create new ads all the time:-)

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@rosebud yeah. See if your competitors are using display and see what creatives they are building out. No reason to reinvent the wheel for testing purposes. Moat. com used to capture animated gifs from competitors, but I don’t think they do this any longer — at least not for free. You can still use it for free to get ideas though. When I was spying a lot starting out, WhatRunsWhere was solid as well as AdBeat. But that may have changed now. Also look at the heavy display guys in other verticals, and don’t be afraid to try ugly ads. LowerMyBills has some of the most disgusting creatives that work great.  

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@rosenda Good ones, thanks. I also check the FB ads library, as some of the fat cats think and act in campaigns, so the FB ads often are similar to the GND ones.  

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@rosebud I’ve found native ads to better approximate display performance. AdPlexity is a great resource for native spying. Take the top performing native ads and create 300x250 animated gifs and you’ll be off to the races.  

Answer 8

@trapezium whatever ad format you use, if you fail on the Display Settings, you will fail. Display advertising is a special Art. And please guys, if you don't know how to work in negative placements, please stop Display