"Google Display can help you reach users while they are browsing their favorite websites, showing a YouTube video to a friend, checking their Gmail account or using mobile devices and mobile apps." This is the definition provided by the Search Engine to summarize the functionality of Google Display Network. But how to intercept the right channels and the right audience?
When creating a Google Display campaign, there are many targeting possibilities.
For Awareness campaigns, the targeting options available are:
- Demographic, thus identifying the age, gender, parental status, income ... of users who will view the Display ads
- Affinity audiences that is a collection of over 100 segments identified by online behavior. Thanks to Google's algorithms, we are able to divide users according to their passions, habits and interests to focus our ads on the most suitable audience.
- Custom affinity audiences, fill the gaps of the previous one. If the desired "affinity" is not present, it is possible to create a personalized audience to get in touch with groups of niche users.
For Influence Consideration campaigns, the targeting options available are:
- In-market audiences, which allow you to reach users when they browse competitors websites and actively watch and compare products/services similar to those you want to sell. These segments therefore give the opportunity to reach users based on their demonstrated purchase intentions.
- Audience segments customized by intention, useful for intercepting users who intend to buy in real time. You can identify them thanks to the insertion of keywords or urls that best represent this audience (or you can choose from those created by Google).
- Similar audiences, can be extracted from a remarketing list or upload (which we will see later) and will be composed of users with the same online behavioral characteristics. Google is able to identify and segment these users based on their recent searches or expressed interests.
For Incentive Actions campaigns, the targeting options available are:
- Standard remarketing, which intercepts users of the Display Network who have visited a website, showing them the banner to effectively associate the most appropriate message to each user
- Dynamic remarketing, which we will deepen next week by talking about Google Shopping, which includes in the ads the individual products images displayed by the user in question.
In addition to the synergistic link between target and objectives of certain Display campaigns, Google also offers other targeting methods:
- Landing page targeting that helps identify which individual pages of a site you want the Display ad to appear on.
- Keyword targeting, identifying the keywords that may appear on the websites visited by the users you want to intercept
These two choices also present the downside, i.e. the exclusion of certain landing pages and keywords of the websites. Excluding specific placements helps campaigns on Google Display Network to more precisely track the target audience to optimize and improve performance.
With the advent of digital technologies and the possibility of tracking conversions, purchases, leads, visits etc. in an automated way via web, experts had access to a huge amount of data. But as history teaches us, we have to going back and analyze the foundations and principles that led to this. The future would be characterized by the integration between online and offline, and this is where we find the last targeting methods available for the Google Display: Customer Match. This technology, very close to the just mentioned remarketing, involves users thanks to the cross-data of online + offline. Allows to create:
- Cross-sell or up-sell audiences promoting conversion based on previous purchase channel.
- Loyal audiences that rely on historical data to identify long-standing customers and promote special offers, loyalty programs or new product suites towards them.
- Ex audiences to re-engage or reactivate customers.
The world of the Google Display Network is very vast and knowing all its secrets is almost impossible. To exploit it, however, you can call an experts.
E-Business Consulting, web agency since 2003, can be the ideal partner for the realization of your campaigns on Google and to intercept your potential customers.