What is GDN?

Google’s Display Network (GDN) allows advertisers to reach people across 35 million websites and apps as well as properties that belong to Google such as YouTube and Gmail. According to Google, their Display Network can reach over 90% of internet users worldwide. This accounts for more than a trillion impressions served to over a billion users each month. Although there is the argument that GDN results are not as high quality as other campaigns, primarily Search and Shopping, it remains a powerful tool which can help advertisers both from an awareness perspective, as well as helping work towards objectives such as Lead generation and Sales.

How can we use GDN campaigns?

Although today’s blog will be focusing on Prospecting GDN campaigns, I will outline a few other examples of GDN goals below. There are different goals we can use GDN ads for such as:

1.       Prospecting

• Advertising to new users who may be familiar with products like those we are advertising but lack brand awareness.

2.       Remarketing

• Users who may have interacted with our business before by visiting the website in the past.
  • Can target generic website visitors or users who have taken some kind of action on the website such as purchasing, subscribing by email, abandoning the cart, or having submitted a form amongst others.

3.       Competitor Activity

• Another goal here would be to target our competitors.
  • We can target users by the websites they have visited and, in this case, we can include different competitor sites and ask Google to target users who are similar to those visitors.
    •      Then we can incorporate some copy and ads to highlight our clients’ products, services and USPs to show why they are better than the competitors to entice the users to buy from our client instead.

Prospecting GDN campaigns and possible placements to use

Today’s blog will be focusing on the Prospecting side of GDN campaigns and the different placements we can use to target our desired audience. One of the key areas of GDN campaigns to help us run successful campaigns is the targeting used to reach desired users.

We can target users by placements such as Websites browsed, YouTube channels, YouTube Videos, Apps or App Categories. For instance, we were running ads for a store which focuses on Golf products such as clubs, golf balls, clothing as well as other golf equipment we could target via the below placements.

Over 322 Golf related websites, over a thousand YouTube Channels and YouTube Videos as well as 415 Apps. The potential pool of relevant users that can be shown our ads here is very promising to say the least.

Below, we have some examples of placements along with some screenshots of how they may look in those placements.

Websites

As a Golf store we can target highly relevant websites which are tailored to information about golf as a sport and different type of equipment. Some examples are: https://www.nationalclubgolfer.com/ which currently has an estimated of 4m impressions, https://golfguidebook.com/ with an estimated of 300k impressions and https://www.golfertroop.com/ with an estimated 500k impressions. The screenshot below is from the golfertroop.com website and it shows 3 different types of GDN ads that are shown while users interested in Golf are browsing their site.

Imagine if we, as an advertiser, would show ads in here for this Golf Store client. By targeting this placement, we would put a lot of relevant ads in front of users who are very interested in this topic and have a higher potential to either click on our ads and proceed to purchase something or just see our ad with our brand name on it multiple times which can then help us from an awareness perspective. That means that in the future, when this user needs to buy a new golf club or other golf equipment, they will have seen our ads multiple times, increasing the likelihood that they remember our client’s name. They will then search for what he needs on Google’s search engines and will either visit our client’s site via one of our paid ads or via another channel such as Direct or Organic.

YouTube Channels & YouTube Videos

Similarly, we can target channels such as Rock Shiels Golf which has 2.49m subscribers or Good Good which is another golfing channel with 1m subscribers. Additionally, there is the option of targeting videos such as “Tiger Woods’ Best Shots Of The Decade” which has received 1.41m views or “Golfing with a Walmart Starter Set Of Clubs” which has 774k views. These are some very relevant placements which our Golf Store client would be very interested in! Please see below for an example of a potential ad space in YouTube videos or channels.

Once again, showing the users interested in Golf our brand and informing them about any potential offers, we create opportunities to drive them to the site or make them more aware of the brand which can result in long term growth.

Apps

Similarly, we can also target very relevant ads such golf gaming apps or Golf GPS which would be used by users which are more inclined to play golf outdoors and may be interested in purchasing equipment from our client. Please see below a couple of examples of apps we can target.

Conclusion

GDN campaigns, although they do provide traffic of “lower quality users” as the ads served are more intrusive in a way where users are not actively seeking the products like they do on Search ads, they can still provide a lot of value due to the sheer volume of users they allow us to reach.

In this blog we mentioned the importance of GDN ads to aid your prospecting activity and how they can help to entice new users who are familiar with products like the ones we have on offer. The key here is selecting the right placements that we want to target so that we can put our ads in front of the right eyes. This will lead to benefits such as sales/leads, and more long term benefits such as Band Awareness where users will remember of our clients brand and will then seek their site via other channels such as Direct, Organic, or even our Paid Search ads. If that user has been to our site before, they may already be served ads via GDN remarketing campaigns which will be focusing on past website visitors. Having remarketing in place would allow us to fill in the funnel and get previously engaged users to interact with us again and with their intent to buy being higher (they are revisiting our site), they may proceed to purchase more frequently at this stage.

Therefore, if you are not using GDN ads, we would strongly advice that you do as there are some immediate and hidden benefits that can help your company and clients grow by filling the user funnel to a website, both from an awareness perspective, but also through remarketing activity.