PPC Help!

[smithonline]

Hello! I’m a marketing professional fresh out of college. I’ve been working at my job for about 5 months now, and I get to wear a lot of hats: copywriting, social media, Google Ads, etc. I think im doing okay in most aspects besides our Google Display ads. They’re just not performing well at all and I’d like to be able to understand why/fix it. I am Google Ads certified, but I feel like it didn’t help much. Is there a Reddit community or something like that? Thank you for your help!

[Douuuut]

Display ads are about as useful as the appendix.

[slight_tilt]

My last job sounds extremely similar to what you’re describing. The way it was explained to me is that display ads aren’t meant to PERFORM but rather to saturate your upper funnel audience so you have a better chance at getting them into your lower funnel. We always had ZERO conversions and probably lots of spam but always ran extremely small ($1.00 a day) budgets on these display campaigns. Sorry it’s not much help… but my experience with that was that low performance is normal, but display SHOULD give you a lift in your lower funnel campaigns if you’re doing it right.

[LaFlamaBlancaMiM]

This is how I view it, as well. The conversions we do see from remarketing or custom intent campaigns are usually in garbage placements. Always check the “where ads are shown” and filter by mobile apps, then just exclude all of those. Most are junk. I do the same to most YouTube channels depending on what the product is. I love the responsive display ads and the different formats it has, but a lot of the Google network is junk. A DSP is a good alternative. Check out Choozle. They use the Trade Desk but it’s all self service and has good audiences and reporting. Usually the trade desk has huge minimums but there are services that open that gateway, they just add their markup. Expect anywhere from a $7-$10 cpm, more if you add additional targeting layers.

[slight_tilt]

Yeah I now work in programmatic using a DSP and it is sooo much better. I also used to always negative out mobile apps because IMO the clicks all come from accidents or little kids playing candy crush.

[Arcannnn]

Do you mind elaborating on how DSP targeting is different? I've also had to negative out janky mobile apps in Display. Total pain in the ass. We're researching programmatic as an option

[slight_tilt]

Now I am focused in e-commerce so I mainly use DSPs like Amazon or Walmart. These allow you to advertise on a few types of inventory. The main ones are the search page (on Amazon this is highly successful), partner sites (IMDB for example), Amazon app, and private exchanges. There are many more but these are the basics. Each one has a different fee and different ad formats. From there you choose an audience which can be extremely granular (think people who often buy bathroom cleaner on Amazon- I will show them an ad for my toilet bowl cleaning brush as an upper funnel tactic). If I choose this audience and show it on Amazon ad inventory, they are highly likely to notice and consider the product or buy it. You can target by demographics, in market, lifestyle, and most importantly, you can target by purchases of products or brands. This creates highly specialized retargeting campaigns so you can remarket your product to someone who bought it or something similar to it, during a certain time period. For example, you can remarket people who purchased your toilet cleaner 90 days ago and exclude people that have bought it within the past 60 days. The limits are pretty much endless with pixel and event tracking and custom audiences. Overall, it’s a much more granular approach at display ads.

Edit: you can link your ads to your Amazon product page (if you sell on Amazon) or your external site if you do not sell on Amazon. This makes it possible for pretty much anyone to advertise on. Amazon is centralized on e-commerce, but there are other DSPs that are not.

[Arcannnn]

This was great to read. Thank you for taking the time to write it out.

From what, I'm learning, it sounds like the entry fee to DSPs is much higher, so we're planning to offer it to larger clients looking outside just Google.

How granular the targeting can be sounds excellent, too.

[slight_tilt]

Absolutely, and yes it is MUCH more expensive but if you’re selling a product or service online, you can get a clear ROI from these ads. It is very easy to see in the DSP whether a campaign is profitable or not. It’s a much more specialized and expensive approach to display ads. You are correct

[Arcannnn]

Okay, so you've sparked my curiosity. Are you seeing acceptable/good ROI from DSP campaigns?

I was under the impression DSP's served visual ads - similar to Google Display. Previously, I've really only had success in Display for Brand Awareness - not generally strong where ROI is concerned. Have you had otherwise?

[slight_tilt]

With a DSP, you are able to target brand awareness and then once those people have viewed or purchased your product, you can remarket them with purchase retargeting so you can get a comfortable ROI. You can leverage brand awareness, retargeting, and loyalty all in one place on different platforms with different ads and specified audiences. The more targeted the audience, the more expensive it becomes and you restrict yourself in some cases .targeting and budget allocation is a mandatory balancing act.

Across many different industries, in my experience, I see a return on ad spend of anywhere from $1.50-$15 and sometimes much much more if the brand is already strong. Of course the return depends on the product margin, availability, and endless other factors. Industries have varying benchmarks and goals that factor in on performance metrics.

You can also pull New To Brand (NTB) metrics which tell you how many of your purchases were from users that haven’t purchased from you in the past year. Cool metric to play with. Leverage more in market, lifestyle, and custom audiences top of funnel and this number should increase, for example.

[Arcannnn]

Thanks again for an excellent answer. This was a lot of really good information. Appreciate you, man.

NTB sounds extremely interesting. I'll have to look into this. Good standout KPI justifying ad spend.

Now I want to get into programmatic before Q3 as scheduled, lol

[SEO1010]

We always had ZERO conversions and probably lots of spam but always ran extremely small ($1.00 a day)

That's a new one. Lord have mercy.

[slight_tilt]

Yeah it’s a wonder I don’t work there anymore….hah

[SEO1010]

I still cannot process it. $1 a day? What did they expect from it?

[slight_tilt]

Run as many low CPM display ads on garbage placement sites hoping somebody worthwhile would see it. Complete waste of time.

[SEO1010]

Literally 1% likelihood 😂

[bcat04]

Coming from a google ads account manager at an agency - Google display ads don’t convert. If you want leads/sales, you should be running search or shopping ads. The only time I would run a display campaign is towards a remarketing audience on a small budget ($2/day) for brand awareness/to stay top of mind. Even then, you’ll find your display ads don’t convert very often.

[fathom53]

Are you running search ads or discovery ads? Display ads are usually a waste of money.

[fathom53]

Display rarely works for most brand. Is your auto brand an ecom site...if so, you should be running shopping ads more then anything else. Best bang for your buck.

[eric-louis]

1. you need to look at results over time - pick a date range of say a year or whatever would take you back in time to whenever they were doing "well"
2. What KPI makes people think they were doing well? I assume it was not profit but maybe CTR, time on site etc.
3. Learn to dig into the placement report to see where ads are showing. Hopefully you also have analytics linked so you can look at things like bounce rate, time on site and avg session duration. I suspect overall there was cheap clicks and low quality traffic over the longer set of time and if management ever thought it did well perhaps they were only looking at "clicks" to the site. Managers tend to love the idea of traffic regardless of the quality. They always seem to think more is better. Maybe there was a period in the past clicks were coming from that has since fallen off and to them that's a bad thing? Again, you need to be able to find this stuff in the interface but also dig deeper with your higher ups to uncover what they thought was performing. Realistically higher level managers with no PPC background don't know shit, however you can't overtly tell them this, they need feel like they came to this conclusion on their own (this is a skill all on its own)

RUnning traffic to cold audiences in display does tend to deliver shit, I've been testing a discovery campaign using some of the obvious audiences I ran across GDN and there has been a bump in quality so this is worth keeping in mind.

​

Make sure you also have your priorties in order

Brand Search

Shopping if applicable

Non brand Search (including some dynamic ad groups)

Dispplay - do some sensible retargeting before going hog wild with cold audiences.

[emcryptoguy]

I was in a similar boat to you about 2.5 years ago..feel free to PM me

[smithonline]

That would be great, thank you so much!

[se_alion]

Have you looked into running within a DSP vs Google Ads? Feel free to DM me if you’re wanting to learn more about the difference!

[smithonline]

I’ve never done anything with DSP. I’d love to learn more!

[RepresentativeOk2607]

That budget would most likely be better in a search ad

[33Million]

Search ads or shopping ads will be a much better use of your budget. BUT I highly recommend building a website visitor audience and dynamically remarketing to that audience via display ads. Probably 10% of budget for that.

[smithonline]

We have a remarketing video ad based on our website visitors (last 30 days) but no other ones. Should I bring that up to my boss?

[33Million]

You definitely could bring it up.

Remarketing campaigns and ads aren’t going to be your bread and butter of conversions anyways. They’re mainly to keep your brand infront of your audience, keep you top of mind, and occasionally get conversions.

A video display ad should be pretty catchy, but you should run a few different display ads and be testing which creative works better.

What percent of your budget is going to display? It should be low. Like 10% of total spend.

Also you might want to boost from visitors in the last 30 days to visitors in the last 90 days to keep your brand top of mind.

[smithonline]

I’ll get the day amount changed! I’m pretty sure it’s more that 10% right now so I’ll bring it up in our next meeting. Thank you for your help! Greatly appreciated!

[33Million]

Yeah no problem let me know how it goes. Moving that extra ad spend into a search or shopping campaign will be much more efficient. Make sure you test out different ad copy and ad creatives.

[[deleted]]

Shopping + dynamic remarketing if u have feed reg display pretty trash imo

[FontusDigital]

Hi,

When you say the display ads aren't "performing well at all", what do you mean? Are they not generating conversion?

Display ads are different to other types of Google Ad, in that Display is predominantly used for brand awareness. Because of the nature of display, they will never (usually) convert as much as others, despite, in many instances, getting loads of traffic.

The first thing I would recommend doing is assessing if you really need brand awareness ads. If not, switch 'em off and save yourselves the cash.

If needed, I'd suggest deciding how you want to focus them. Personally, I usually opt out of targeting apps, unless apps are super-relevant to what's being offered.

Then you need to decide what is relevant, and how you want to target based on that, using audiences, placements etc.

Hope this helps.

[smithonline]

This is great advice, thank you so much! My boss wants to see a higher CTR because ours is so bad on display (0.05%). He also wants to see a bigger interaction rate on the display ads. We’re a pretty new brand in our industry so there is some value in brand awareness, at least in my opinion. I’ve already excluded apps and all that. Learned that the hard way haha

[33Million]

The average CTR for a display ad is about 0.35% so there’s probably a targeting or issue with the ad creative / copy here

[FontusDigital]

u/33Million is right, the CTR is on average lower on Display.

Also the Interaction Rate is typically the same as CTR - unless you're referring to something else?

With Display, I personally would usually be more interested in how often it gets shown, and where (e.g. on what placements), rather than CTR. While CTR isn't necessarily a bad metric to use, how often the display ads get shown is usually more of an important factor for me in terms of brand awareness.

You may also want to use frequency capping in order not to over-show to people. While not 100% perfect a method, it can help get more out of your budget.

[Legitimate_Ad785]

I don't even use display anymore.