AdWords Network Types
- Google Search
- Search Partners (requires Google Search)
- Display Network
Google Search
- Unique bids for each keyword. If you sell handbags but have a higher margin on leather handbags than you do on fabric handbags, you can choose to bid more for leather handbag related keywords than you do for fabric handbag keywords.
. - Negative keywords. If you sell designer handbags, you may want to use knockoffs, imitation and fake as negative keywords for your campaigns since people who are looking for knockoffs probably won’t convert into buyers of the real thing. In Google Search campaigns, your ads will not show when your campaign negatives are included in the search phrase. (Note: Negative keywords can be broad, phrase or exact match so you need to determine the correct match type to achieve your goal.)
. - Ad Extensions. With Google Search campaigns you can use all Ad Extensions: phone, location, product and sitelinks. Ad Extensions can dramatically improve performance of your campaigns when used properly. The ability to show your physical address, phone number or a photo of your product along with your ad could increase CTR and conversion exponentially.
- Competition. Most markets are fairly saturated by now so you will be competing with many other sites for clicks, driving up your costs.
. - Quality Score. CPC is highly dependent on quality score, which includes variables beyond your control such as how well other advertisers’ ads perform on the keyword.
Things to Note
To have a successful Google Search campaign you need to properly optimize your campaigns to maximize your Quality Scores. This includes proper campaign and ad group organization, ad text optimization, bid changes and virtually all other facets of campaign management.
Search Partners:
Search Partners includes a network of mostly undisclosed sites but also includes searches does on aol.com, Google Maps, amazon.com and parked domains.
- Sitelinks Ad Extension. Sitelinks Ad Extensions do show on some Search Partner websites, potentially increasing your ad performance.
. - Moderate traffic potential. In most cases, Google Search Partners generates half to equal the traffic that Google Search does so there is a decent amount of traffic available.
- No unique bidding. You do not bid separately for Search Partner sites so there is generally no CPC savings versus Google Search.
. - Lower quality traffic. Traffic may be lower quality depending on the source. Unfortunately you cannot view the performance of each site. You can see performance for categories of sites including error pages, parked domains, forums, image-sharing pages, social networks and video-sharing pages by clicking on the Networks tab then scrolling down to Exclusions. Under Campaign Level, click on the Add Exclusions button and select Exclude Category. This should show the traffic for the date range you have selected. You can review performance and add category exclusions as needed.
Display Network:
The Display Network allows you to place both text and banner ads on a wide variety of websites including sites like about.com, social networks like myspace.com and websites run by everyone from large businesses to your prolific teenage blogger neighbor.
- Large traffic potential. The traffic potential of the Display Network is virtually unlimited as the network is very large and growing every day. Every time a site in the network ads a new page, the network grows. And every time a new publisher joins AdSense, the network grows. There are a finite number of people specifically looking for your product. But there are many more people who may not yet know that they want or need your product and these people can be reached through the Display Network.
. - Branding. Advertising on the Display Network places your brand in front of many people every day, which can result in higher conversion rates offline and through other advertising mediums. The branding aspect of the Display Network is free when you opt to pay per click. So, while you may look at Display Network statistics and see thousands of impressions and few clicks, you need to consider that each of those impressions was a branding opportunity.
. - Lower cost traffic. In many cases you can get traffic at a much lower cost on the Display Network than you can through Google Search and Search Partners.
. - ROAS management. The Display Network offers the ability to manage ROAS in a different, yet equally effective way from the keyword-bid based Google Search and Search Partners. Since you can bid individually by placement, if you find that referrals from one website convert at a much higher rate than the average, you can make that site a managed placement and increase the bid. Conversely if you find that a site converts at a lower rate, but not low enough to exclude it, you can add that site as a managed placement and decrease the bid.
. - Banner ads. I know, we all chortle on the inside when we think about the old days of banner ads. But, they are still a very effective form of advertising and branding and the Display Network offers you a very easy way to do banner advertising without having to purchase inventory from numerous individual websites.
. - Ad management by placement. Since you can add managed placements to ad groups and specifically bid to have ads placed on those sites, you can create ads for specific websites and ensure they appear there. For instance, you may want to create banner ads with color schemes that stand out when displayed on the top referring placements in your campaign. Or, you may run a promotion for people who are members of a website because their interests are closely aligned with your products.
. - Excluding sites and categories/topics. Since negative keywords don’t work the same on the Display Network, you can better target your campaigns by excluding sites and categories or topics so you don’t have a large amount of unwanted impressions or non-converting traffic.
- Negative keywords aren’t the same. Negative keywords in Display campaigns don’t guarantee that your ad won’t show on a page containing that keyword. They are used more as a guide for Google to determine what your target audience is. You need to use site and category exclusions as well as negative keywords to properly target your ad groups.
. - Time consuming management. Properly vetting placements and topics can be a very time consuming task. Weeding through individual urls to see which pages of which sites are performing well is enough to make anyone go cross-eyed even if they have the time to spend on it. If you are unwilling or unable to spend the time to do this properly, your campaign will not perform as well as it could and you may lose money on a campaign that could be profitable.
. - Long optimization cycle. Since the CTR is much lower on Display Network campaigns, gathering statistically significant click and conversion data can take longer than it would with high volume Google Search and Search Partner campaigns. It can be difficult to wait for enough data before making a decision so people frequently make premature decisions before enough data has been gathered. By prematurely excluding a site, you may miss out on valuable traffic. Conversely, by prematurely increasing the bid for a placement, you may spend too much on low quality traffic. Patience is required for proper PPC optimization of all types, including Display campaigns.
Things to Note
The Display Network includes AdSense for errors sites and parked domains. Both of these can result in a large volume of low quality traffic or be very profitable, depending on your product and your target market. You need to keep a close eye on these in the Placement Report. Parked domains and AdSense for errors placements are easily identified for the Display Network just like placement categories for the Search Partner network. Click on the Network tab, expand Exclusions, then under Campaign Level click on the Add Exclusions button and select Exclude Category. This will show statistics for all categories, including parked domains and error pages.
Just like the Search Partner network, performance on the Display Network doesn’t affect quality score so you should not be concerned with the drastically lower click through rates you will see on the Display Network as long as you are meeting your performance goals.
So, Where Should I Advertise?
Assuming that you have determined what type of campaigns you can have based on your budget constraints, you can now choose which networks you will target with your AdWords campaigns. I recommend that everyone start with Google Search and Search Partner targeted campaigns. These are the easiest to start and only require that you have a good understanding of your core keywords and ROAS goals. When you launch a new Google Search campaign, you should also target Search Partners so you don’t limit your traffic potential. Once you have gathered enough data on the Search Partners, you can exclude categories or opt out of Search Partners all together if they don’t perform well enough to meet your goals.
The Display Network offers great opportunity for:
- New products and services that people don’t search for yet.
. - Products that are complementary to product sold by other sites. For example, meat rubs and BBQ sauces which may be purchased by people who are shopping for new BBQ grills.
. - Products or services that people don’t yet know they need or want.
. - Lesser known brands that offer better prices or quality than better known brands.
. - Companies that have additional advertising budget that cannot be spent on search alone.
. - Companies that cannot afford to compete on high cost keywords on Google.com.
Start your advertising efforts on the Google Search and Search Partners networks. If you have additional budget, need more traffic than search alone can provide or have a product that people don’t regularly search for, you can branch out to Display Network campaigns. No matter which networks you choose to advertise on, the most important thing to remember is to separate Google Search/Search Partner campaigns and Display Network campaigns. The way each type of campaign must be structured, the type of ads used, the bids and how you manage each type of campaign are all so different that you cannot effectively manage them within the same campaign.
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Great job, Pam… very well written!
I love your suggestions for how and why to segment the different types of Google advertising. I can’t tell you how many accounts I’ve come across where client’s not only have all of their keywords within a single campaign (running a single ad), but also have both Search and Display settings active. In most cases, the very first thing I do when taking over the management of an account is simply turn off display. Impressions drop and instantly improves click-through rates and thus quality score, and costs drop thereby improving my client’s ROI.
There’s a time and place for display, as you have outlined above.
Thanks Karl! That’s a good strategy for making immediate improvement in performance. Keep in mind that display CTRs don’t actually effect quality score so it must be the other good changes you are making, such as adding ad variations which increase search CTR, that are increasing the quality score and ROI. However you get there, it’s a great feeling when you can make such positive changes for clients and see results!