October 8, 2021
The Ideal QA Process in Digital Advertising
Google’s Display Network has the ability to reach over 90% of people on the internet, worldwide. With that kind of reach, you want to be confident that your GDN remarketing campaigns are running correctly. But where do you start? What should you be checking in your campaigns? In this post, we’ll walk you through five top items you should be checking in GDN remarketing to quickly improve your campaigns.
Is Targeting Expansion Turned On?
Do you accidentally have targeting expansion turned on? When auditing display campaigns, we see this time and time again. When you leave this setting on, Google will target additional audiences outside of the ones you set, causing you to potentially spend way more than you wanted to on audiences you didn’t even define. It might be worth testing audience expansion for prospecting, but when it comes to remarketing campaigns, targeting expansion means you’ll be showing ads to people who haven’t already interacted with your website.
Quick fix for this? Turn it off.
Have You Built Out Time Decay Audiences?
Building out time decay audiences within display remarketing campaigns is a must. You want to bid more on potential customers when they’re more likely to convert (i.e: closer to the time they’ve interacted with your ads). With time decay, you’re able to tier your bids based on expected intent. Typically, we build out 3, 7, 14, and 30 day audiences, but you should look at your average days to conversion and build out audiences that make the most sense for your business.
Do You Have Proper Audience Exclusions?
You’ve taken the time to build out the right audiences — make sure you are excluding the right audiences, too! There are two ways to exclude audiences: at the ad group level and at the campaign level. To start, here are a few audiences we recommend excluding from your display campaigns (but note that this can be adjusted to fit your marketing needs):
- Past converters: For lead forms or products that are only purchased once, there’s no need to keep showing ads to people who have already filled out a form or bought what you want them to.
- Employees: This one should be pretty self explanatory.
- Time decay audiences: Once you build out time decay audiences, you need to set proper exclusions so that your longer time decay audiences aren’t cannibalizing the smaller ones (i.e: exclude your 3 day audience from your 7 day audience, etc.).
Do You Know Where & How Often Your Ads Are Being Shown?
Where your ads are shown matters. You don’t want your ads to be racking up a bunch of spend on junky clicks. This is why it is important to regularly look at your placements and negate anything that isn’t doing well for you. For a more comprehensive look into how to identify strong and weak placements, check out this blog post.
In addition to checking where your ads are showing, you’ll want to make sure you have frequency caps in place to prevent your ads from showing to the same user too many times. In order to prevent ad fatigue, we typically recommend setting a cap of four to six ads per day per campaign.
How Are Your Devices Performing?
Last, but certainly not least, check how your devices are performing and how much you’re spending! The last thing you want is to look at your devices and see that all your spend is going towards mobile, while all your conversions are coming from tablets. Take a look at what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust bids accordingly.
For additional help on your display campaigns, contact our team!
