Now that we’ve entered a new year a lot of businesses and marketing agencies will be reviewing the performance of their PPC campaigns during 2018 and planning their attack for 2019. That being said, Google has announced a few new features for us to consider within our 2019 strategies when it comes to Display campaigns and those features are as follows:
The audience expansion tool
This new tool is designed to help advertisers reach more of their target audience, and drive more conversions at a similar cost per conversion.
It allows advertisers to increase or decrease their audience reach and see estimates for the number of weekly impressions they are likely to achieve by moving the slider backwards and forwards:
Advertisers are reminded that by using automatic targeting they’ll be extending their reach to users that they otherwise would have missed, so any additional conversion from this audience is one that you would not have had if you hadn’t extended that reach.
Ads will appear on new placements, so it’s only suitable for those advertisers who are not too precious about where their ads appear.
Dynamic prospecting
Similar to dynamic remarketing but dynamic prospecting shows products to potential customers based on their past interactions across Google and other sites, people that have not necessarily been to your site before, like they have to with remarketing.
Using API Google works out which of the products in an advertiser’s shopping feed are going to be of interest to a user, based on their previous search history etc, and shows them products that are most likely to lead to a sale.
Google does state that “this is not a guarantee of improved performance”.
Custom intent audiences
This new feature allows advertisers to reach an audience with their display ads by segmenting ad groups by keywords and landing pages they’d like to target. There is an auto-created segment or advertisers can specify keywords, URLs and apps that are relevant to their product/service. Google will take this information and then show the display ads to people who are likely to be interested in these things.
In order to create a custom intent segment complete the following:
1. Sign into Google Ads.
2. Select one of your active display campaigns.
3. Click Audiences.
4. Click the pencil icon , then select Edit ad group targeting.
5. Select an ad group.
6. Under “Targeting,” select Narrow targeting and click the grey plus icon next to Audiences.
7. Click the pencil icon next to Targeted audiences.
8. Select In-market and custom intent.
9. Click the blue plus icon next to New custom intent audience.
10. Give your custom intent audience a name and add your related keywords and/or URLs.
11. You can see ideas and estimated audience size on the right hand side.
12. Click Create to finish.
I would definitely suggest selecting keywords and URLs to create the segment, rather than trusting Google’s auto-created segment.
Pay per conversion
Back in December Google launched the bidding option pay for conversions for Display campaigns, as an additional choice instead of pay per clicks.
Similar to pay per click, pay per conversion means that an advertiser only pays when their display campaign converts and will never pay above their target CPA.
For example if a target CPA is set to £10 and the campaign drives 20 conversions in a day, the advertiser pays £200 for that campaign and the number of clicks and impressions is irrelevant/ignored.
This is only an option for display campaigns using Target CPA and is an option to be selected in the bidding section of the campaign settings – select the campaign you would like to change, click setting on the left hand side and then Bidding:
This could be a cost effective way for some advertisers to bid but, like with all bidding strategies, will need careful management.
