In one of our earlier posts in the Quick Results Marketing series, we talked about how you can place your ads right in front of potential customers when they are searching on Google. In this post, we talk about reaching your target audience while they’re browsing the web and visiting other websites that may be relevant to your products or service. The combination of the right audience, the right website, and a powerful advertising message can be a powerful combination, leading to lots of click-thru’s to your ecommerce site.
Google has partnered with literally millions of sites to create the Google Display Network (GDN), a one-stop-shop advertising network to place your ads all across the World Wide Web.. Sites include well known ones like Gmail and YouTube as well as relatively obscure ones, but in all cases your ad will appear right next to content that is relevant to your product (how does this work?). GDN covers over 80% of all Internet users, so you are not missing out on any major audience segment by placing all your online advertising on this network.
Here are the reasons why you should be using the Google Display Network.
Reason #1: Context-Specific Advertising
Find your needle in the massive Internet haystack.
The ability to zero in on a very specific audience in terms of their demographics, their interests, and the content they are consuming when shown your ad is what makes the GDN the powerful marketing tool that it is.
Google Display Network works just like Google AdWords. When you set up your campaign, you select your keywords and ad groups, and then Google identifies sites that have content relevant to your selected keywords. Google then displays your ads on those relevant sites.
Here’s an example of contextually relevant advertising:
Reason #2: More engaging ads
Wow them with visuals.
Another feature of GDN is the ability to place ads in different formats – Text ads, Image ads of various sizes, Rich Media ads, Video ads, and even Mobile ads.
The ability to have ads with visuals, animation and video is what makes the GDN different from the text-only ads that appear on search result pages.
Reason #3: Remarketing
Hi, it’s me again.
A third exciting and extremely valuable feature of GDN is “remarketing”. Remarketing is the practice of serving up your ads to people who have previously visited your website. Once a person has visited your online store once, if you’ve got a remarketing campaign set up, when he visits other sites on the GDN he is shown your ads. Remarketing has the effect of a multi-pronged campaign directed at your target audience. It can be used by etailers for specific tactical objectives, such as addressing all people who added an item to your shopping cart but didn’t complete a transaction, or more commonly, creating top-of-the-mind brand recall to get an edge over your competition.
Accessed through your Google AdWords account, the Google Display Network is a powerful yet easy to use tool that allows you to set up a hybrid campaign that combines context-based ads in various formats to create brand awareness, visibility and website traffic and remarketing ads to increase conversions, thereby impacting your ROI.
