Definite Guide to Google Display Ads – Campaign Creation

create campaign in google display ads

How to create a Display Campaign

  • Create a skeleton Campaign 
  • Create Ad Group & Add targeting

Create a display campaign is a very difficult process. A campaign is like a car engine. You need to put right things in right place. Unless, it won’t work in your favor. So to help you on this, I created a structured way to create campaigns and you won’t miss a thing. There are four steps to know about how to create a display campaign. 

This guide contains 4 steps:

  • Campaign skeleton creation
  • Sub campaign creation
  • Add-on setups
  • Campaign exclusions

Campaign creation:

You might ask what is the skeleton creation? and why it’s important in creating a display campaign. A campaign skeleton is a top level settings which remains same over a long period of time. What a bone is to body is this to the campaign. It remains sames and other things may change.

Step 1:

google display campaign creation

Click on the  + button. & select display network only.

select display network only

You might wonder why can’t,  search network with display network?

If you choose this option, google will decide how much budget it can spend on search & display. Usually in search with display select campaign google will spend majority of budget in search and less in display.

But it’s not an ideal due to

  • You may never get a great performance in either of search & display due to budget split.
  • Google itself recommends to have a separate campaign if you are going to run campaigns on search and display.
  • Flexibility on bidding, budget & targeting is good if you choose to create separate campaigns

Type : No Marketing objective

no marketing objective

In the very next step you will be asked to choose, which type of display campaign

Choose : No marketing objective. Why?

By choosing this option, your will have all the options available for display network campaign.

If you choose any marketing objective, you will be having limited options based on objective. This doesn’t have any impact on campaign performance, it just a way of choosing whichever options you’d like to have.

Locations:

google display campaign - locations

You should use the location which is relevant to your service/ product offering. Once you finalized the location, google offers various ways to set location.

You can just type in your location in the search box. If you want to target united states of america, then your gonna enter United states of america in the search box and select.

If you want to target user who are in close proximity to your place, you can do radius targeting.

If you have multiple locations in mind ( like 1000 locations), you can upload all at once using the bulk locations options.

Languages

languages

What is the language that your target customer speaks?. You should select the languages that your potential customer would speak.

Bid Strategy

bidding

Since you’re creating the campaign afresh, you should opt for the manual bidding to start with.

There the reasons why you should choose manual bidding strategy over others :

  • Google automated algorithms need a sample data to optimise based on previous performance, new campaign doesn’t have any data so it is not advisable
  • If you want to learn and know better how bidding can impact campaign performance you should try manual bidding
  • Automated bidding means, less control over the campaign performance, advanced advertisers prefer to have tighter control over the campaign performance.

Here’s how you can select the bidding strategy

click on the blue button,

choosing a bidding strategy

Budget

budget

How much the budget should be one of the mystery questions for the first timers. Let me give you a simple rule of thumb. If there’s already many display campaign setup in the account, and those campaigns have similar targeting & location setting to your campaign, then you can go with the bidding and budget by + or – 30%.

The rationale is

Your campaign budget should be atleast 3X of your goal cost.

For example, if your campaign objective is lead generation, then to generate a lead it cost you INR 500, then INR 1500 ( 500*3) should be your minimum budget for the campaign.

If you don’t know how to arrive at cost per conversion, here’s the formula,

Just use the thumb rule that conversion rate in display campaign can varies from, 0.1 to 1 %. Means you can get conversion when get clicks at least ( 1000-100).

So try to set a budget that will be 500. So try to have a budget that will get you 500 clicks on display campaign initially and then increase or decrease based on performance.

You can get the cost per click from the display planner.

Delivery method :

delivery method in google display

Choose standard. This delivery method will ensure your ad is evenly served over the period.

Accelerated delivery will spend your budget as quick as it can ( provided there’s enough impressions for clicks).

Ad extensions

Google display networks has two ad extensions you can use along the ads. One is location extensions and phone number extension. More about extension here.

Schedule

If the product offering or service is day dependent, you can choose to put ad only on certain days ( Sunday’s). This option helps you to run your ad on a particular day and time.

Ad delivery

campaign ulrs in google display

Ad rotation

If your using more than one variant ( in ad copies), you can use optimise option to let google finalize on ad copy which receives more clicks and more conversions.

Frequency capping

This option lets you to limit no of impressions per user per day. If you leave this unaltered, google will show any number of impressions to users. This could be annoying to users. You should consider using a frequency capping in most of the display campaigns.

My frequency capping would vary from 4-9 based on the campaign objectives.

Digital content label :

Google provides  a pre-created list of labels. You can exclude categories based on your services. I’ll exclude audience with parental guidance.

Device

campaign ulrs in google display

This options let’s advertisers to target different device ( mobile, desktop, tablet). If you’re promoting an android app, then you should use this to exclude other devices.

Campaign URl options

campaign ulrs in google display

This options let’s advertisers to append extra parameters to landing page urls to pass more data to landing page & capture.

Location options

location options

Location options consists of three options.

  • People in or showing interest in my targeted location
  • People in my targeted location
  • People who show interest in my targeted location
People in my targeted location.

Choosing this option, you will be targeting people who are actually in the targeted physical geography. People’s computer ip should be in that targeted geography. If your targeting people in Tamil Nadu, with this options people who actually in tamil nadu will be targeted.

People who show interest in my targeted location

This people who aren’t in the actual targeted location but show interest towards targeted location. In this option these people will be targeted. If you wonder how google determines their interest, search query, browser history are the good places to start with.

People in or showing interest in my targeted location

This is the default option. If you certainly only want to target people who are in actual location, then you should change to “people in my targeted location ”option. This option also contains OR which means choosing this options, users who match either of the above scenario will be targeted.

Campaign Name

After all this you do, you finally got to name your campaign. It’s very subjective. You should name this campaign in such a way that any one reading the name should understand targeting and objective.

That’s all about the how to create display campaign skeleton setup. Continue for the next chapter.

By yathav

I'm very passionate about technology, marketing & analytics. Using WordPress and working on blogging & search engine optimization for almost 8+ years, I'd like to share my thoughts, hacks and best practices about what i do professionally & what I experience.

One comment

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *