Optimize your Display Advertising Campaign

Once your advertising campaign ran for a day or two, it is worth starting to look at the results. By now you have seen how you can approach evaluating the metrics, the process for evaluating a display advertising campaign is very similar to how you would do this for a search campaign in Adwords.

Campaign Set-Up Summary

As a starting point, let’s recap our marketing objective and the basis for this campaign:

• Our ultimate marketing objective is to generate awareness for the Ezequiel Farca brand and drive visitors to the website
• We assumed that we can pay a maximum $50 per visitor while maintaining a positive ROI (this assumes a 0.2% conversion rate, meaning that 0.2% of website visitors become clients that spend an average of 50K)
• Our total budget was about $690 (we said we would use about $100 per day, and in this case, we ran the campaign for about a week)

Evaluating overall campaign success

Let’s take a look at the high-level results of our campaign.

Evaluating ROI
The overall data suggest show that I was able to generate 362 clicks on the display ads I ran. These clicks landed on the page: www.ezequielfarca.com/projects and thus offered an opportunity for visitors to check out what Ezequiel’s company offers. The average cost per click (CPC) was $1.95, well below the 50 dollars I was willing to spend. If we really believe that 0.2% of these visitors will convert and spend an average of $50K, then every visitor I bring to the site is worth $100 on average (0.2% * $50,000=$100). Since I am now paying $1.95 for every visitor the display campaign has great return on investment (ROI) for Ezequiel Farca.

However, there is one very big IF in my assumptions: “IF we really believe that 0.2% of these visitors convert…” We really have no idea about the conversions. We don’t know how many visitors of the Ezequiel Farca website really become clients.

Other metrics

There are a few other interesting data points in this high level report.

• The average click through rate (CTR) of the ads is 0.62%. That is not a bad result.
• The Cost per thousand (CPM) is $12.07. While I am paying on a CPC (cost per click) basis for this campaign, I can calculate the CPM for the campaign [(total cost/impressions)*1000]
• This number can be helpful in case I am running other campaigns on a CPM basis, that way, I can compare the costs.

Evaluation of Ad Creative

Next, let’s take a look at the performance of our different ads. While we showed you the creation of one ad during our walkthrough, we created one more ad in this ad group. You can see both ads below.

Remember that both these ads are part of the same ad group, so they were targeted to the exact same audience. The only variable that is different between these two ads is the creative itself. And, when I set these ads up, I only varied the images I was using, I used the same headlines and description. Google Adwords then served these 2 ads, choosing randomly between the two creatives I had set up. So, this basically comes down to an A/B test for the two ad creatives.

Clearly, there is a difference in the performance of these ads. The first ad has a CPC of $1.40 whereas the second ad has a CPC of $2.36. The second ad has a slightly lower CTR. Only 0.61% of the impressions lead to a click for that ad, vs. 0.63% for the first ad. So, it looks like the first ad is working better for us here.

In a case like this, it is a good idea to pause the ad that is not performing as well, and keep the better ad. Then you can create a new ad to try to improve on the performance of your best creative.

Evaluation of targeting characteristics

Remember that for this campaign, I chose to target using keywords. I had a list of keywords on the basis of which I wanted Google Adwords to target my display campaign. Google Adwords then showed the campaign on sites that have content related to my chosen keywords, or they showed the ads to people who had shown an interest in these keywords. Now, I can evaluate how my keywords are performing.
Here is the list of keywords that I ended up using for this ad group (I changed them a little after the walkthrough), ranked based on the CPC (from low to high) for those keywords that did receive at least one click during the campaign.

Ideally, I want the cost per click to be low for keywords that I believe are relevant for my offer. Of course, as with search ads, the cost is affected by how competitive a keyword is. Keywords that are popular with advertisers will receive more bids and the cost to show your ads related to these keywords will be higher.

In this case, the cost per click varies quite a bit, from 2 cents to 7 dollars per click. Of course, some of the data are not super reliable here. ‘Luxury design’ is the cheapest keyword, but my ad was only shown 99 times related to this keyword and it received 1 click. Ideally, I would have a little bit more data to judge whether this is really as great a keyword as it seems to be. On the other hand, the most expensive keyword was ‘luxury furniture’, at 7 dollars per click. The keyword generated 3 clicks during the course of the campaign, so that is not yet a lot of data to rely on. However, since a customer who is looking for furniture may not end up spending a lot of money on a project, it may be worth re-assessing this keyword and already retiring it. “Design modern furniture” is also relatively expensive at $3.78, so a similar reasoning may apply to this keyword.

Note that the keyword phrase “designer living room furniture interior design” performed a lot better. It received many impressions and it has a good CTR, with an attractive $1.32 CPC.

We can make our campaign more efficient by optimizing our keyword list. Similar strategies to the ones you saw in the Search Engine Marketing course apply here. The most important strategies are: adding long tail keywords and pausing the expensive keywords.

1. Pause keywords with high CPC
Keywords for which the CPC is high may consume a large portion of your budget, while you might have been able to generate clicks with cheaper keywords. Since it is our goal in this campaign to drive traffic to the site, and since we don’t have information on conversions, we have no reason to believe that the high priced keywords are any better than the cheaper ones. Note however that it may be too early to take out keywords for which you have very little data.

2. Expand the list of keywords with keywords similar to the best performing keywords
Once you have a list of keywords that perform well, it is a good idea to expand that list with related keywords. You can use the Adwords Display Planner tool to find suggested keyword groups based on your best keywords.

One other way to try and improve on this campaign is through selecting a different targeting method. Remember how we chose to run this campaign targeting sites related to our list of keywords (or people interested in content related to these keywords). It is a good idea to set up another Ad Group in which you choose a different targeting method all together to see whether you could improve on the results. For instance, we could choose to set up a campaign using affinity audiences targeting or in-market audiences. Or, you could target your ads to be shown on specific websites through managed placements.