Module 3 - Complementing your campaigns with display ads

What is a display ad?

A display ad is an ad that appears on other websites around the web, on YouTube, in apps and on all sorts of placements. One of the things we have found absolutely essential and incredible is remarketing campaigns through the display network, and you can do this in several ways.

You will need to install Google Tag Manager and Analytics so that Google can follow the visitors to your site and see who is coming and going and who is taking action. Then you can remarket to people who have watched videos, people who have seen certain amounts of a video, people who have been on certain pages of your website, or people who have been on certain products. You can segment everything. If someone has taken an action or a set of actions, you are able to show them a display ad.

Let me show you what one looks like. Let us try Manchester United and see if they have got any ads on there, which should make me popular with a few people. Accept all, I will subscribe later, and let us scroll down. There is an ad for their app, but I cannot see any external ads as yet. As it turns out, Man U do not have any display ads on their site.

Let us go back and find a different website. Let us try the Daily Mail as a newspaper, and scroll down to see if we can see some ads. Here is an ad from AdRoll running a display ad in the Daily Mail. There are others popping up here, Next popping up, and Under Armour. These are display ads, and they should follow your audience around the web based on the activity they have taken on your site or on your videos.

Why bid cost per click on display?

Because a click means somebody has taken an action and is genuinely in your funnel. If somebody has watched 75 per cent of one of your videos, and there is a Google Tag Manager section of this course showing you how to do that, you can then set up display remarketing ads.

The beauty with the display network is that you can choose your bidding strategy. You can choose cost per thousand impressions, CPM, you can choose cost per click, or you can choose target cost of acquisition. All of these bidding strategies are available. We like to use cost per click a lot, because then you know somebody has taken an action and they are in your funnel. This is not top of funnel, this is the next step down. They have done something, they have been on one of your videos, been on your website, maybe spent a certain amount of time on your site.

So you could set up a remarketing tag for somebody who has been on your site for more than a minute as an event, and create an audience around that. What we would probably do is exclude from that list existing customers or converting traffic, so people who have been to other pages we might take out of that remarketing audience.

This is sort of middle of the funnel, continual engagement, and brand awareness as well. We can show ads on these types of sites to people who have taken action, and it does not cost us anything if we are on cost per click, because they are still scrolling and they are being reminded of our brand. They may well then see another video, or they might see a remarketing piece on another social network such as Facebook. But this display piece is key.

How do you build the campaign?

Go into Google Ads, add a campaign, choose a display campaign, and build it on a cost per click basis. If I go in here and look up this one, remarketing 90 days, it actually says currently not eligible, violates policy and cannot run.

You may well get that quite a lot when you are setting these types of ads up. I know why this one is not running. It is because it has got a call to action in the ad itself, and Google does not like you capitalising certain things. It does not like words that say click here, watch now, or free. All these types of things within display ads do not work brilliantly.

What ad formats do you need?

You need landscape and square assets, plus your logo. If I go into this ad and edit the assets, here are the assets within it, and there is a section in this course on exactly how to set these types of ads up.

These are the type of ads that are going to run around the web. You will need a 1920 by 1080 format, that is landscape, and you need square as well. 600 pixels square works well. You could make them 1200 square, because Google will resize them to fit wherever they are going to show. Those ones are 720 by 720. You will need your logo as well.

How do you attach the remarketing audience?

Once you have built your display campaign and you want to use it in a remarketing loop, go back to your audiences. Let us say we are in this ad set. Go to audiences, edit audiences, select the ad group you want it to apply to, then go to custom audiences and browse, and your custom audience is there.

Those custom audiences come from tools, audience manager, and again there are parts of the course that will show you fully how to do this. You go to custom audiences to build the affinity audiences and the remarketing audiences. Connect your audience sources, such as Google Analytics and your YouTube channel. Under audience sources you can add a Google Ads tag, Tag Manager, Google Analytics and your YouTube channel. All of these can be audiences you pull from.

If you see the Google Analytics GA4 tag here, this event count has got 244,000 visitors on it. I could have a 30 day audience of those, I could have a 24 hour audience, or I could have specific pages within the website. There is a whole section on setting up those audiences within the course, so I will not go through it now.

Who should be running display remarketing?

Anyone running paid activity, including anyone running search PPC on its own. Display remarketing should really be part of your mix, and it complements all of your activity, not just your YouTube ads. This would be brilliant for anyone who is just running search PPC ads. They should be using this anyway.

To recap what I have shown you: set up your different goals, set up the campaign as a display campaign, choose remarketing audiences having connected Google Analytics, GA4, Tag Manager and YouTube, and then go and refine and design which of those audiences you want to show your display ads to.

Will it cost a fortune?

No. If you are setting up on a cost per click basis, you are not going to get thousands and thousands of clicks unless you have got an enormous site. But the people who come through these remarketing campaigns on display particularly do convert incredibly well.

We have seen, for example, a cost of acquisition at the top of the funnel on a cold audience of, let us say, 20, 30 or 40 bucks. On remarketing it might be 20, 30 or 40 cents. So these can be incredibly effective.

Hopefully that has shown you the importance of display remarketing. Other pieces within the course will show you exactly how to set that up.