How to Plan Your Display Campaigns with Google Display Planner

Building a display campaign can be an excellent way to widen the reach of your AdWords account and find valuable new customers. But where do you begin? Enter the Google Display Planner. The Display Planner has been around for a while but over the last year there have been a number of tweaks proving it to be a much more useful tool.

Getting Started

Getting started is simple. To navigate to the display planner first click on Tools and then Display Planner. You can then either enter keywords or websites you know your audience to be interested in, or your own landing page. In the example below we have used the Periscopix home page:

You can then choose whether you would like to use cost per click (CPC) or cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) bidding. This is a brilliant feature that will help you plan a strategy around your KPIs and achieve performance based results, something we have long been advocates of.

Next step, hit ‘Get ad group ideas’!

Choosing Your Ad Groups

This screen will show you various targeting options and provide tips on a structure for your ad groups and new display campaign. As you can see, Google has recognised that our landing page is for a pay per click agency and has therefore recommended keywords relevant to this and search engine marketing topics. A really useful feature here is that you can also select each ad group idea to get stats on how much traffic you can expect to see, and crucially, for which demographics and devices:

Of course this is still an automated tool and we would always recommend checking each of the ideas carefully before adding them to a live campaign. Although there may be a case for the below placement in a brand awareness campaign (CPM bidding), we’re not convinced this would have a strong direct response, which we selected on the first screen (CPC bidding):

Individual Targeting Ideas

If you’re feeling more adventurous or want to expand on an existing display campaign rather than building a new one, you can also use the Individual Targeting Ideas tab. This will allow you to layer different targeting options over each other to develop a more sophisticated and focused ad group.

This is likely to reduce the number of impressions you can expect to achieve, however in this scenario we are looking to achieve a direct response, so the more targeted we can be without cutting traffic too much, the better.

Going Further With Google Analytics

In addition to the individual targeting ideas, you can also review the demographics and interests of your current website visitors using the audience reports in Google Analytics. You can then use this data to profile new visitors that are most likely to convert.

For example, the audience report below shows that a lot of customers for this fashion client are also looking to purchase travel and accommodation, so we might consider targeting these in-market segments in our display campaign with holiday themed fashion ads:

Summary

It is worth spending some time playing around with both of these tools and using your own creativity when building a display campaign. They won’t provide you with all of the answers but you never know who you might find.

Image source: peppapig.com

For more tips on planning and optimising your display campaigns, why not check out some of the blogs below!

To view the article on Periscopix website as written by Emma Searle, please click here.