Google Display Network (GDN) Marketing

Build awareness and create desire

Understanding the fundamentals of Google’s Display marketing suite is essential to creating a custom strategic plan between our agency and your business.

It’s important to get a grasp on how the digital network will bring opportunities to your business, so we’ve identified and perfected the techniques to achieve the key things that display ads bring to your brand.

The killer Display Network brings you the ability to build your visual marketing strategy on a broader scale, creating a higher sense of brand positioning and awareness among viewers across the web.

More notably, they are specifically targeted due to their interests within search engine results, and their behaviour across the Google Display Network overall.

This means that this strategy of so-called ‘passive’ marketing has an active method of directly influencing the thoughts, emotions and environment in which your future clients find themselves.

Still with us? Great. It’s complicated, but our job is to explain exactly what Google Display ads are and then guide you through how best to integrate them into the online marketing strategy for your company.

How does Google promote brands through Google Display marketing?

Let’s do a quick recap.

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is the platform used to boost your listing in search results by paying per click. Within this suite, you can also nominate to use the Google Display Network (GDN) for Google remarketing efforts.

Display advertising keeps Google’s algorithm and user behaviour in mind. When a user engages with a website – whether through organic SEO or PPC like Google AdWords – they add a product to their cart and might decide to abandon the checkout. That means they didn’t convert (not a good thing).

How to manage those conversions

Remarketing through the Google Display Network allows you to encourage this user to complete their purchase by promoting your brand’s text ads, visuals and other ad formats wherever they’re dwelling across the web.

If your audience targeting is set correctly, these Display Network campaigns allow you to increase your conversions across the board, getting more customers through your door.

Apart from remarketing through the Google Display Network, the second and most important way to encourage conversions is to ensure your site is visually engaging and complete with quality content.

No ads in the world can promise conversions if your advertising strategy doesn’t prioritise CRO factors on-site. From blog posts to downloadable resources, how your site performs on other devices and even the user experience – this all plays a role.

Read More

In focus: Display ads and the Google Display Network

As we’ve established, the ideal combination of digital marketing tools we can bring you as a Google Partner includes both written Search ads and visual Google Display ads.

While calling Display ads visual is somewhat of a misnomer, they are intended to grab attention and create high rates of click through to your website, but also reinforce your brand identity to users who have engaged in your brand before.

A note on quality

This is why your image ad or text ad needs to be extremely high quality, and a lot of skill and expertise is needed to create a convincing experience.

It’s important to remember that these ads will be presented on a whole range of over two million websites within the Google Display Network.

This environment appeals to a whopping 95% of global Internet users, so if employed correctly, these ads can be incredibly powerful in increasing your return on investment and boosting your overall profit — all while rapidly expanding your audience.

Love those promises but not sure what makes for a great display ad?

No problem, we’ve got you covered. Keep reading for our guide on what we think is fundamental to succeeding on the Google Display Network in 2021.

Read More

What you need to do to succeed on Google Display Network

Before we get started, we want to make sure that you’ve got some great graphic design and/or visual content to complement your product on the Google Display Network.

Whether you choose to focus on establishing brand identity through reinforcement of your brand’s logo and palette or you choose to highlight a specific product, we’ve got the chops to showcase your company’s content at its best.

All your ads need to be punchy and swift, as well as fit into a small space on an unrelated webpage, so they need to really stand out in a dynamic visual way.

Google’s own analytics suggests 20% of viewers clickthrough on visually-focused ads, while 18% click on text ads. Creating a killer combo of the two is essential to making your ads stand out from the crowd.

One of the key assets of the Google Display Network (GDN) is that by creating an initial input of advertising content, you’ll automatically be able to generate banner and interstitial ads which adapt themselves to formatting on both desktop and mobile browsers (and of course Android and iOS).

As a Google Ads agency, part of our job is making sure your advertisements are current and engaging, with high and increasing rates of clickthrough as your ads are continuously and passively surrounding your future clients as they browse the Internet.

Everyone knows that in any kind of marketing, establishing your audience is essential to defining your products, establishing needs and moving towards a high level of retail excellence.

These classic standards don’t just stop at physical marketing though — they continue to apply as we delve into the complex analytics of Google ads.

When you run a PPC campaign on Google Ads, you’ll reel in a whole lot of data through Google Analytics and the native reporting tools.

From this, you can understand how to best navigate your approach on the GDN, utilising remarketing lists, ad groups and details about keyword bids to assess campaign performance.

From there, you can use these data sets and information as a starting point to develop a strategy that works best for you on the search network.

A note on how we work this process

At our agency, this is one of the essential parts of the strategy we recommend to all clients who are just delving into the digital marketing space.

By expertly targeting Google’s algorithmic processes, our incredible in-house team use cookies, analysis, Google Analytics information, and data mining to place your ads on the screens of members of your audience and prospective customers.

What this means is that we don’t just target certain potential customers, but instead, we are able to find and then specifically target the individuals who have been browsing for goods and services on either your website or looking for similar offerings via Google Search.

In this way, the Google Display Network (GDN) fully integrates the ads for an all-around campaign that works best for your website URL.

Using Google’s native data

Through the in-built metrics and information on Google, and their excellent ability to collect user data on their online activities, we can triangulate the positioning of your ads to make sure that they are displayed on websites in the Google Display Network only, frequently visited by people with interests adjacent to your brand’s ethos.

For example, if someone is looking for a pre-natal preparation website or investigating babies’ health, it would make sense to position display advertising for babies’ prams, cots and other accessories on these websites.

There are two parts of this audience establishment and expansion. The first is termed ‘in-market’ and is best used to describe users’ engagement with e-commerce, and the second is called ‘affinity’ which creates a unique user profile based on recent search ads data, as per the example above.

Through analysis of individuals’ shopping habits and also areas of research and perusal, we’re able to provide you with widened target audiences extending throughout Australia and beyond.

While increasing the diversity of your market is most definitely achievable with the Google Display Network, expanding your reach isn’t your only benefit from using Google ads. There’s also the incredible feature of list-making and integration we industry insiders call ‘remarketing’.

But what is remarketing? You ask.

‘Remarketing’ specifically refers to the process of re-exposing existing clients of your business and other visitors to your site to transform brand awareness into brand recall.. and hopefully consideration and loyalty.

Through lowering your CPA and reinforcing target audience engagement/reach at no added cost, we reckon this is one of the best digital marketing strategies around — even if the click-through ratio is not as high as SEO generated data.

While we’re still discussing digital marketing, there are significant overlaps between a display ad and billboard, as well as the Google Ads world and the realm of online real estate.

Image ads on the Display Network are located on the edges of pathways and sites, just as billboards are placed on the edges of highways and city streets in the real world.

And as for the relationship between advertising and real estate, this isn’t a radical statement. We all know that location is king in the property market both offline and online, as well. 

Placement matters

What we mean by this is that placement targeting is essential to the success of your ads. We’ve covered the other forms of targeting as well, but we’re not just limited to the interest marketing that we discussed above.

We’ve learned from our decades of experience as a Google Premier Partner that placement targeting is one of the best ways to convert your viewers from the consideration phase, through to completing a purchase at the checkout.

Placement targeting is used to describe the location of your ads on websites that fit into the same general category of interest – from car sales to clothing!

This approach ensures that your target market is directly being reached, not just in terms of demographics or browsing activity, but also in establishing a connection between your brand’s identity and their area of interest (resulting in even greater future ROI).

Making stand-out ads and avoiding banner noise

There was a study done as far back as 1998 which established that banner advertisements are sometimes ignored – subconsciously or consciously – by Internet users, due to their frequently spammy nature.

Everyone who has used the web for half a decade or more knows that these ads in the past were often full of clickbait or highlighted trashy websites without a clear intention or purpose.

But hear us out.

Banner ads have come a long way over the last two decades, and there’s a reason why industry leaders across a whole variety of sectors continue to pursue display ad campaigns using the GDN. That’s because they work — as highlighted by all of the insights and techniques we’ve gone through with you above.

Engage through compelling visuals

Using rich multi-media and multiple ad formats on the Display Network, we’ll make sure your banners aren’t able to be ignored, even by those with the most consumer fatigue.

Let’s go through the different types of content we can create to make sure your Display Network campaigns stand out from the crowd.

Video ads for that va-va-voom

Video ads are generally limited in the minds of the public to online streaming websites like YouTube advertising, but we’ve found that they actually make for one of the most engaging types of display advertising.

Whether you opt for a more personally created content (like Apple’s iconic user-featured advertising campaign showcasing the camera capabilities of their iPhone 11) or even just a repeated video GIF as the background to your banner ad, the movement and dynamism of video is the way to get ahead in our overly saturated online attention economy.

Plus, we all know that video is having a moment — with TikTok and Instagram’s Reels, everyone is tapping into the power of short sharp videos that make a statement. 

There’s also the added bonus of direct flexibility of video between desktop and iOS/Android browsing, without the need for too much reformatting… and we can even work to integrate your ads onto YouTube, which is another phenomenal Google tool and part of the GDN.

Interactivity is in

While some might think that video is interactive enough, we like to do things differently. That’s why we believe that a display ad with interactive features is the way forward. 

What we mean by this isn’t just interactivity in terms of clickthrough to your website, but instead, engaging your viewer from the get-go with embedded content allowing for a more complex engagement by people you’re targeting.

Encourage your audience to interact

One popular example of this is IQ quizzes or games advertised online, although you might have spotted these campaigns on Instagram and Facebook as well.

By people clicking through and answering questions as part of a quiz, or being able to play through one level of an exciting new game, they can thread to your websites upon being engaged, hopefully signing up or converting in the process.

In the end, this process also generates a much higher rate of click-through and drives traffic right onto your website… and it allows you to collect user data to follow up with further marketing campaigns in the future.

Another incredible, yet indirect feature of an interactive display ad is that it does wonders for increasing brand awareness with people that may not know much about you because it’s so fresh.

Not everyone’s on to this advertising train yet, so get in before the people catch on and you’ll be on your way to being the best in the field.

Read More

So how do I get started with display campaigns on the Google Display Network?

That’s what our people are here for. In this brief overview, we’ve provided you with compelling information regarding the structure and often overlooked benefits of tapping into Google’s Display Network with engaging online campaigns.

We’ve told you all about the kinds of goods and services which do best in this kind of online climate, in addition to explaining some of the ways that display campaigns can exponentially increase your ROI, appeal to your target audience, decrease CPA, and drum up engagement for your brand at unprecedented levels.

Don’t forget that display advertising is also great for those first steps towards client conversion: brand positioning and brand awareness.

But this is all just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve only just gotten started with discussing the variety of options that the GDN can provide for your business — but we’ve probably covered enough for one day.

Where we come in

If you’re interested in hearing more about how display advertising can boost your website, in addition to drafting up a custom solution for your business, our incredible team of in-house experts are at their screens and ready to assist you at any time.

Whether you’re seeking to advertise on the Display Network or reach more people and customers on another platform, we’ve got the knowledge and the expertise to extend your reach, build your brand and bring you up to the top with the best bang for your buck.

We provide round-the-clock support for all of our incredible clients… and we can’t wait to add you and yours to our portfolio as well. 

Read More

Ready to start a Display Campaign?
Get in touch with us today.

When you start working with our agency in Australia, we ensure that your needs are covered by a variety of gurus in the fields that your individual company needs, with the entire process overseen by a team leader with over a decade of experience.