Display

Google last week introduced the addition of some new tools and metrics for the Display network. By far our favourite is the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool (CADT).  One of the most frustrating things running a display advertising on Google was the fact that you didn’t know if your ads appeared on a site. As a result you had to wait for some data to come back and then optimise the account. For example now with the Content Ads Diagnostic Tool you can see that your placement-targeted ad groups are not running because they lost the auction or that they are running fine.

The next metric introduced is the Impression Share (IS) which represents the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear on the Google Display Network. Again very good addition as it can help advertisers to add more budget if they feel there is more space.

The last addition is the Relative CTR, Relative CTR shows you how your ads perform relative to other competitors ads running in the same website  on the GDN. A great way to benchmark your performance across the Display Network. How do they calculate that? If your display ads have a CTR of 0.08%, while other ads in the same places on the GDN have a CTR of 0.04%, your Relative CTR is (0.08)/(0.04) = 2x.

Overall the new additions offer more transparency that can help advertisers understand more on the GDN and help them to optimise the placements better. Google the last few years is actively pushing Display but so far it was in some case like a black box. Not its very clear and give us a lot more options.

Search and Display network (or Content network) are two different  …. but sometimes advertisers confuse them. The graph below separates the two and explains the different mindset of the users.

It’s very important to remember that when a user is searching on Google he/she is  proactively looking for a service or products. On the other hand when a user sees a banner or an ad when visiting a website they are not looking for ads. (This explains the low CTR on the display network). In the next few days we will post a few interesting articles on the Google content network explaining in more detail how it works.