How to set up a Display Campaign

Trying to be discoverable online to the right audience can take some serious digital marketing strategy – and a whole lot of patience. Speeding up the process and attracting strong foot traffic on your site is possible – preparing for us to say “just joking”? Don’t worry, we’re not going to. What we are going to say is… display campaigns. We want to chat with you about what they are and how you can set a display campaign up to better your business.

Google display ads are shown to users across millions of websites, apps and video sites that all make up the Google Display Network (we will call it GDN throughout this guide), based on their previous online movements – yep, the old someone is following you and their name is Google. You may already know that Google has arrangements with millions of websites and apps, meaning the site receives revenue for allowing Google to advertise there.

So aside from the obvious extensive reach, why should you advertise with a Google display campaign? Put plainly, GDN or the Google display network reaches 90% of all internet users worldwide and it earns 180 million ad impressions on a monthly basis – it’s freaky stuff and you best believe you want to be part of it.

Still not convinced if activating a display campaign is right for your business? Trust us, it’s something that will be of interest to your business if you want to reach audiences that have expressed interest in your products or similar products within your industry. As well as this, your ads will show up everywhere. Everywhere! YouTube videos, blogs and websites who allow Google to advertise increasing your brand’s visibility, directing traffic to your website and converting browsers into returning customers.

There are four types of ads within the GDN depending on what is best suited for your business. Primarily these ad formats are text, video, picture or rich media which can be a mix of text, images and video. Using one of these ad formats, you can dictate when your ads appear for users. The most common is displaying ads to users who have not yet interacted with your website or product – simply capture their attention and draw them to your website with your content alone. Another option is reminding them of a product they have browsed on your website. This is called remarketing and allows you to reconnect with those users who have shown interest in your business previously – and they thought they could escape!

When creating your Google display ad, it’s important to keep in mind that keywords determine your display ads location alongside associated content. It’s beneficial to also create a list of negative keywords. Adding these to your campaign will make sure your ads don’t show up in promotions related to those negative terms. Once you set your interests, the ads will show for relevant users with a set list of categories of interests based on their search history. These ads show for tagged users that have visited pages on a website and these ads can get segmented to different users based on their gender and age range.

Now that you know what to look out for, we can break down in a step by step guide on how you can create your first Google display campaign – let’s go!

Your first step is to log into Google Ads and click on “campaigns.” Then click on the “new campaign” button which will bring you to a view of goals.

As our ultimate goal is to drive conversions, we recommend opting for Sales or Leads. For this tutorial we have selected Leads.

Website traffic, Product and brand consideration and Brand awareness and reach are great options if you have a large budget and you are trying to reach a lot of people with your messaging.

Next, we will select the campaign type. Select Display.

You will now scroll down and see a few different options for campaign subtypes that you can use. With Smart display campaigns, you do not have control so Google will use all the data they have about people who visit your website, people who are interested in your services or products and they will attempt to reach these customers with your display ads. There is also Standard display campaigns which allow you to target remarketing audiences, in market audiences, custom intent and so much more. You have a lot more options and freedom with a Standard display campaign. Finally there is the Gmail campaign, which targets users as they are browsing their emails.

We are going to begin with a Smart display campaign so we do not have to worry about all of the different target methods you have to use:c

We can now enter our business website under the ways you would like to reach your goal and click continue.

Now we will create our campaign, where you will see that our type is Smart and goal is Leads.

You can then check your campaign name, the locations you wish to target. Here you can enter any location you wish. If you want to target a small location, you can define right down to a city or state.

We can then define who we want to target. We suggest selecting People in or regularly in your targeted locations and excluding People in your excluded locations. We are doing this so people who are not in our target location are not shown our ads, costing us more for little conversion.

Next is language targeting, we recommend sticking with English. However, if you have a very specific niche you could also add their native language here too.

As you continue to scroll down, we will reach Bidding. This is an important aspect for any type of Google Ads campaign as you are bidding for clicks to your website. We will focus on Conversions and set a target cost per action, this allows us to set a limit of the cost of driving our campaign. In this case, we will enter $5.00 – meaning it will take $5.00 or less to drive a conversion. Your target CPA should always be less than the actual value of the product or service on your website. As you continue to scroll down you will see the Pay For option. Leave this as Pay for Clicks rather than Viewable Impressions.

Next you will enter your budget, which is the average amount you want to spend each day. A good tip is to take your monthly budget and divide by 30. Then this will give you your daily budget.

You can skip Dynamic Ads, we will go into detail about these here. (link to another article)

Next we can scroll down to Additional Settings, where we can set start and end dates, conversions and content exclusions. Select these options if you want your ads to not display for certain topics, such as sensitive issues.

We can now Create our Ad group. For a smart display campaign, we generally just set up one ad group allowing us to focus on creating the best and most relevant advertisement we can. We will name the group ‘Smart Display Ad Group’ and you can see the targeting is automated. Google will use website visitor, landing page insight and your best performing keywords to automatically target these users. So, the more data Google has on your website, the better your targeting will be for your campaign.

So now we will create our advertisement. Responsive display ads allow you to upload multiple images, video, headlines and descriptions. When creating your responsive display ads, select Images and Logos and you can see Google can scan your website for suggested imagery to use. We don’t always recommend this as the image sizes may not be suitable. If you hover over the question mark symbol, it will display the recommended sizes.

We recommend uploading your own images, this way you can control the size and also you own the rights to the images. By selecting upload, you can choose 15 images and 5 logos to use in your ad so you can create all sorts of variations to use in your display ads and Google will mix and match the imagery in conjunction with your headlines and titles to find the best possible combinations.

After you have uploaded your files, you are able to select if you wish to use them as your logo or an image. After you have made your selections, click save. You will see the ad will begin to form in the preview box on the centre-right of your screen.

You then have the option to add a video, this is created by adding a Youtube Link. This is useful if you have further video showing your service or product.

Next you can add multiple headlines, we recommend adding five. Similarly, you will do the same with descriptions but only one long headline. Keep these to a strong call to action, exactly describing what you are offering the users.

Continuing to scroll, you can set the Final Url which is your landing page that users will reach when they click your ad. Make this landing page URL relevant to the messaging in your headlines and descriptions.

Again, as you are making these changes, you will see your Ad begin to fill out with this information in the preview box on the centre-right of your screen.

We recommend skipping Advanced URL options, as your campaign will track automatically into Google Analytics. However, if you are using additional tracking platforms you can enter them at this point.

If you have a different webpage optimised for mobile you can add a different url link at the TEST tickbox and finally, the call to action under more options. It will be set to automated, however selecting the drop down will display a plethora of options for you to change to. We will set ours to Shop Now:

You can then select custom colours. This allows you to ad specific brand colours, if you have any.

At this point, you will also see a tick box to show this ad on text and native ad placements – leave this tick box selected:

You can now select “Add to Ad Group” which will return you to your original ‘Create Campaign’ page. At this point, you can select New Ad to create another ad and repeat the above process, however with multiple images and headlines, one advertisement is already giving you a lot of different variations so it’s technically not just one single ad.

And now for the fun – click Create Campaign. We have now created a smart display campaign and you will be redirected to a confirmation page: