What’s changed?

Previously Google’s best practice suggested creating a theme with 5-10 keywords per ad group. Results were always shown at ad group level only so you didn’t really know how the keywords were working together to form the contextual advertising ad group.

Google recently released the Display Network tab in beta and pretty soon this will roll out across all campaigns.

How will the display network tab affect your campaigns?

Keywords will now be judged individually and you’ll see data at keyword level. This is fantastic for the display network as we’ve never been able to see this level of data before.

Why am I so excited about this? Well, now we can optimise at keyword level! While previously if one ad group was not working we would have options such as lowering the bids and eventually the option of pausing the group, now we are able to keep that ad group running and identify which specific keywords are leading to the high cost per click/CPA and more importantly, which keywords are converting so we can push the bids up on these keywords.

This is happening in the background of all campaigns at the moment so it is worth thinking about already even if you’re not on the beta at the moment.
I ran a test in one of my accounts to test out the effectiveness of broad match across the similar keywords horse & hound and horse and hound.
Results Below:
 

Interestingly both keywords received traffic, but horse and hound received many more impressions and has also received a higher click through rate.
I’m testing similar things with other terms to see the differences with things such as singulars and plurals so will report back when I have more info but there could be some very interesting changes coming soon to the way we build display campaigns!

Building a display campaign at the moment?

My advice would be to take your search campaign, remove any of the longer tail keywords and have the different variations of the shorter tail keywords in each ad group. This might mean that you have 50 keywords in an ad group now rather than 5. This approach means you can always narrow this down once you receive keyword level data.

It is still advisable to split ad groups by themes so you can have different ad copy per ad group, the same approach as with search. This change will not allow you to associate different placements with each of the keywords, so if you need to know which keyword is triggering which placement then you could always try splitting high volume ad groups out into smaller ad groups to get this level of data.

What else to look out for

All display targeting options are listed within the “change display targeting” button at ad group level, as shown below. 

While it is very handy to have all these options in one place, we still advise that you use the best practice of splitting out ad groups by the type of display advertising you are doing. This makes it easier for you to see at ad group level what is and what is not working. For example, an ad group per topic, an ad group per interest category etc. This not only allows you to see how each targeting method is working, but also allows you to create more specific combinations, such as the sports interest category with the keyword “football”. If you added many interest categories to one ad group this wouldn’t work. 

We are always testing ways of improving the performance of our display campaigns. Subscribe to our blog to keep up to date with our latest research and advice and please consider sharing this article if you found it useful.