Increasing Performance of Display Ads

Do you change an ad according to audience, or change the audience to suit the ad? This is a question asked by many, and the real answer is – a bit of both.

If you’re in the online advertising business, you’ve probably encountered the idea of dynamic creative before, in which an ad’s content is catered directly to the user who views the ad.

Dynamic creative is particularly effective in retargeting PPC campaigns, in which the retargeted are past visitors of your site. The customisation of the shown ad usually promotes the recently viewed item, or the item that was left in the basket without conversion.

In cases such as this, it’s an effective technique to change the ad while the audience is static.

But sometimes, when the creative content remains the same, it’s better to target different audiences, thus increasing ROI. It might be more useful to show a surfer in the consideration phase a general ad that doesn’t push them to buy a particular product.

Dynamic audiences are best applied to campaigns like so:

• Search retargeting is when audiences are targeted dynamically by their changing search terms, and can be edited to show only a particular time after the initial view, by adjusting the recency settings.
• Contextual targeting involves the targeting of an audience by persistent keyword optimisation in context.
• Look-a-like campaigns involve the use of your current audience’s statistics and targets similar users. You can break look-a-like targeting down to target history, social data, location or other features. The use of look-alikes will let you find a larger number of users like your current customers and can be useful for increasing ROI.
• If you start with a broad audience, it’s easy to then decipher how to dynamically retarget according to different demographic or personal features. You can optimise your general campaign according to the different audiences within your audience.
• Vary your bids according to which audiences are more valuable (i.e. more likely to lead to a conversion). You can adjust your bid levels by keyword.