Google Ads Display Targeting Options – Optimize Your Display Campaign & Avoid Wasted Ad Spend

Different targeting options on the Google Display Network and steps you can take to optimize your display campaign, which is really important to eliminate wasted ad spend.

In this article, I’ll walk you through two different targeting options. I’m split testing for a particular client, and I’ll reveal how to structure it. And as I said, steps that you can take to optimize it.

Okay, so I recently launched a campaign for a client and not to reveal the sensitivity of this particular client. But let’s just say that they are in the cooking niche or niche for American listeners, we say niche in Australia.

So really, the ideal client for this particular person is getting in front of people who like cooking, specifically baking, essentially. And so therefore, we’re trying to get in front of these people who are interested in that.

So we were testing two different targeting options. The first is keyword targeting. And the second is in market option to explain keyword targeting is essentially me giving Google a bunch of keywords, which I’m actually doing on the Search Network, but this is display.

So it’s completely different. So I give Google all the keywords. And it crawls, or the 2 million plus websites that are out in the Google Ad ecosystem, to find me websites where this particular content has on a website based on the keywords that I give it, versus in market targeting, which is a completely different types of targeting, where Google based on their browsing history, and all their data points, put people into categories based on their browsing history.

And so therefore,you know, we’re not necessarily trying to get in people at the moment that they’re reading particular cooking, and recipe websites, they have just shown interest in that previously, but may not be viewing that content at this particular moment. So here we are in my live Google Ad Account.

And as you can see, here, I have segmented my two different targeting options into different ad groups. Now, this is really, really important, so that we can compare the traffic now unfortunately, conversion tracking is not able to be set up in this particular account for a whole host of reasons we won’t go into it.

So really, the metrics that we need to judge the success of this particular campaign so far, is going to really be two main metrics. The first is click through rate. And the second is going to be the placements like, where are our ads actually being shown, that we could deem you know, are these quality websites or are they is really kind of spammy AdSense kind of, you know, click-baity type websites.

So let’s first have a look at this In-market ad group. So I click on this ad group. And then I go into insights and reports and where ad where and when my ads have shown.

I always rank by impressions, I want to see where that volume of traffic is coming from.

And obviously, if we were to run this campaign for a long time, we would see a whole lot of junk. And so the idea is, as I said, to look through here to find obvious websites that we want to exclude. Another little trick I like to do is I like to rank by click through rate.

And this gives me websites which have like Google ads, or AdSense, really strategically placed for inadvertent clicks.

So this one looks pretty bad. This one does not look like what I want, and this one, etc. So really, I’m going to go through these. 

And what I’m going to do is I’m going to edit, I’m going to exclude this from the campaign because I don’t want it in any campaign, whether it’s keyword targeting, or in market or whatever. 

Also, I’m going to rank by cost, because I want to see that where I’ve spent a large chunk of money 

and minigame.vip, I don’t really want people who are playing games, and obviously this is what I would do. After a little while, and same thing, I’m going to exclude this from the campaign. 

I can also have a look at my devices and see really am I kind of is burning through budget on mobile is and as you can see the huge amount of impressions on mobile versus desktop. 

And I will really be comparing the performance of that.

So let’s go back up a level to the ad group level and look at our keyword targeting performance. So once again, go to insights, reports, and where our ads have showed, if we rank by impressions again, one thing we’ll see as we scroll through here, is it Google’s actually done a pretty good job in getting in front of people who are interested in cooking, and baking, etc. 

So really, it’s found me a whole bunch of websites, that is getting in front of my ideal and target audience here. So that looks really good. Of course, it’s not going to be perfect. And I’m going to have to really figure out which one’s worth excluding.

But we’ll do the same thing where we will also rank by click through rate to see if there’s any ones.

So we don’t want that. And I really want to kind of get through any kind of game type website. 

And that will do the same thing we’ll edit and we will exclude from the campaign. So those placements have been excluded. 

And we can also have a look at devices.

And wow, look at that. Look at that on mobile. That is pretty crazy. 

So there you have it. It’s interesting to see the difference in that different type of targeting on the Google Display Network, and where the websites are have shown our ads and the different click through rate and performance. Ideally, obviously, you would have conversion tracking set up.