PPCHow to Expand Your Display Network Targeting Using Remarketing Information

How to Expand Your Display Network Targeting Using Remarketing Information

AdWords Placement Tool and Doubleclick Ad Planner can help you find similar websites appropriate for your target audience, expanding your Google Display Network reach and generating great results due to your highly specific and relevant ads.

After you’ve acquired demographic information from your remarketing campaign, it’s time to lay out a plan to find and add targeted websites to your AdWords Display Network campaign using your remarketing performance information. To do this, start by learning what websites your audience visits regularly (aside from your own), and how you can place your ads on similar websites.

How to Acquire Other Websites Visited by Your Audience

In order to expand your Display Network distribution, you must first run a placement performance report within your remarketing campaign. To run this report, you need to go into the Networks tabs within your remarketing campaign, and then you need to view the Automatic Placements. Here’s a screenshot of this information within Google AdWords:

AdWords Networks Automatic Placements

When you run this report you’ll get hundreds, maybe even thousands, of websites that display your remarketing ads. Focus your analysis on the websites with the most volume. We’ll continue with the example from my previous article; these are the websites we found in our remarketing placement performance report:

Domains Remarketing Traffic

How to Find Similar Websites Using the AdWords Placement Tool

Within your AdWords account is a helpful feature called the Placement Tool. This tool helps you find additional websites to add to your account. Here’s a quick snapshot of where you can find the Placement Tool within AdWords:

adwords-reporting-tools-placement-tool

Using your pre-existing list of websites, you can search for similar sites within this tool. You’ll need to review the list closely, and add any sites that should be relevant to your campaign.

How to Find Similar Websites using Doubleclick Ad Planner

Another helpful tool to find additional websites is the Doubleclick Ad Planner. The research options in Ad Planner are robust and varied.

First, we’ll review how to base your research on the websites you acquired from your remarketing campaign.

You will want to enter the Online Activity section of Ad Planner in order to use your pre-existing list of sites from remarketing. Here’s a snapshot to show you where to insert your list:

ad-planner-online-activity

This search provides thousands of suggestions. Select the websites that are most relevant to your audience. Remember, this is the demographic that we want to target:

  • Age 35-60
  • Female
  • Focused on self-improvement
  • Concerned with quality of life
  • Self-motivated
  • Self-reliant 
  • Looking for solutions
  • Family household

After sorting through the long list of suggested websites in Ad Planner, here’s a sample of the websites that we may choose:

sample-of-suggested-websites

From this list, we’ve found websites geared toward coupons/deals, photo sharing, news/current events, and health/weight loss. Remember, the objective of running ads on these specific websites is to deliver highly relevant ads in order to enhance our click-through and conversion rates.

Not only can you conduct research using your website list, but you can also enter your demographic research into Ad Planner for additional targeting suggestions. To conduct this type of research, you’ll use the Demographic section of the platform. In the image below, I’ve entered my target audience demographic information:

ad-planner-audience-demographics

In our example campaign, we’re promoting credit consolidation services. Here are sample ads that we could run on these websites that are specific to our target demographic and also correspond to the website on which they appear:

Coupons/Deals

sample-ad-coupons-deals

Health/Weight Loss

sample-ad-health-weight-loss

Summary

Conduct your research in both of these tools because they provide vastly different suggestions. This method will expand your reach on the Google Display Network – you’ll target websites that are appropriate for your target audience and you’ll generate great results because your ads will be highly specific and relevant.

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