How To Hugely Improve Display Network Performance

In my experience, the AdWords Display Network provides the vast majority of traffic and conversions in both my own and in others’ AdWords campaigns.

The Display Network operates in two ways:

1. Automatic Placements: These are sites across the Google network where your ads will display based on contextual relevance; in other words, if the keywords in your campaign are determined to be primary keywords on that specific page, your ad will trigger.

2. Managed Placements: These are web properties (URLs and subdomains) that you manually enter into Managed Placements within the “Networks” tab of an ad group. Your ads will always show on these sites, regardless of contextual relevance, based upon your bid price.

If you’re starting out with AdWords, or just with Display Network advertising, you’ll want to set your campaigns to run on All Placements. This will ensure that your ads begin to appear across the Display Network, based on contextual targeting within AdWords.

However, after some time passes – usually a couple of months – you can pull placement performance reports from within AdWords itself or with any third-party conversion tracking software you’re using.

What you’ll then want to do is export a list of all placements that have generated conversions for you. Also make note of the cost per conversion for each placement versus your profit per conversion.

Once you have this list, you can go ahead and enter the URLs into Managed Placements in the “Networks” tab of your ad group. Also, you should manually set the bid prices for each placement, based on the cost per conversion data versus your profit per sale.

Now, each of those well-performing sites will show your ads on an ongoing, continual basis, meaning a lot more conversions and a much higher ROI for you than were you to continue using only automatic placements.

This tip is a must-do for any serious AdWords advertiser looking to make the most of the system. And once you’ve generated enough conversions in a campaign to qualify  for AdWords Conversion Optimizer (CPA) bidding, you can enable it and that, combined with a well-managed list of managed placements, will really skyrocket your conversions and profits!