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Archive for the ‘Display’ Category

How to plan a campaign on the Google Display Network

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

The Google Display Network (GDN) is the new umbrella name for what used to be called the Google Content Network. Having been seen by many to have saturated the commercial upside of search, Google has rebranded to make it clear that it has big growth plans for content, display, and graphical advertising options.

There’s lots of ways to go about adding a campaign to the GDN. These include:

Keyword based targeting
Site and page-specific targeting
Category based targeting
Audience targeting
Remarketing

And you can use a combination of these targeting tools to improve your targeting options. For example, if you only want to target people who have been on your website previously, who are into travel, and who are reading a travel article on the News site, then you can choose:

Remarketing with audience targeting, and then select keyword based category targeting.

The Google Ad Planner

Google also lets advertisers make use of their (previously agency focused) Double Click Ad Planner. With this tool you can identify sites where you can reach your audience.

To start with, research sites that you know your audience spends time on, or target them by location, interest, demographic or keyword search.

You can choose from pre-defined audiences that are commonly used by marketers. You can also make use of subdomain or ad placements to target by greater detail. You can also use the Ad Planner 1000 to find the largest sites on the web.

The tool is interactive which means that you can rank the sites according to the criteria. And with lists you can note the best sites and placements for use in the future.

You can also use the tool to plan non-Google campaigns by just filtering to those sites not in the GDN. And if you’re fixed on just one or more forms of creative – such as video – you can filter to just those too.

Once you’ve drilled down to just those sites that you’re interested in, you can then grab detailed information from the planner, including traffic stats, demographics and unique visitor metrics.

When you’ve found the sites that fit your criteria, you can add them to your media plan, and either export it straight into your Adwords account or download it as a CSV.

Here’s a video that takes you though the whole process:

That’s it

The Google Ad Planner is an effective tool to plan online campaigns both on and off the GDN. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Tags: gdn, google ad planner, Google AdWords, google display network
Posted in Display | No Comments »

How to advertise on Facebook – a Beginner’s Guide

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

According to recent stats, 1 in every 5 display ad is served within Facebook. That’s an incredible achievement for the social networking platform, which now boasts over 500m users.

There must be a reason why there’s so much advertising money pouring into Facebook, so if you want to find out what all the fuss is about, and would like to try it out, read on.

Set your expectations

Before you get going with Facebook, you need to set yourself some realistic expectations about the environment. If you’re from a search background, you need to radically downgrade your opinion of what a good Click Through Rate or Conversion Rate is.

With search, you’re giving people a product they’re actually looking for. Within Facebook, you’re catching them whilst they’re doing something else. They might fit your target market – and be potential buyers of your product – but they’re busy speaking to friends, looking at photos, spending some leisure time. So they’re much less receptive to your ad, and are less likely to be impressed by it. And they’re not in the environment to be ‘warmed up’ to your message.

So whilst your PPC search campaign may well achieve a CTR of 5% and a conversion rate of 5%, Facebook Ads are more likely to have a CTR of 0.05% and a conversion rate of nearer 1%.

Set some goals

There are plenty of ads within Facebook that have traditional goals. These ads lead to traditional websites, with a message and a call to action.

But some of the more successful Facebook advertising drives traffic towards a brand’s social media, be that another Facebook page, a group, or even an application.

Here the goal is more long term: the creation of a relationship between the brand and the individual, and the hope of some longer term sales. Marketers may well set their goal as a specific increase in the number of Fans or Follows.

For either method, you need to set your goal and relate it back to some financials. That’s easy for the traditional ad linking to a website – you should set a CPA and ROI value you want to hit. But for the latter, you need to place a value on having a fan, and what those fans do in terms of either buying from you or recommending you to others.

Set a CPC and a budget

Integral to defining your financials is setting a budget and maximum CPC. You should set the CPC much lower than the amount you are prepared to pay for a click from search, since the conversion rate will be lower. Once the system works out how many clicks your ad generates it may well push up the CPC you have to pay in order to get traffic.

As with AdWords, set the budget at a level that will not limit your exposure. A campaign that gets suspended because it hits a daily cap is not making efficient use of the platform.

Creative must-haves

This might be obvious, but ads with images get a much higher CTR than those without. Try to make the image intriguing – not just your logo – but at the same time it’s got to relate to your brand and product too.

Your message should follow similar rules to AdWords creative. Avoid excessive punctuation. Write clearly in correct English. Highlight benefits. And add urgency with your call to action.

Make sure you track your ad with a parameter. If you measure your campaigns with Google analytics just use the URL Builder. The chances are that you will be testing out a variety of creatives with a range of targeting options. Be sure to give each ad a unique tracking link to make optimisation much easier.

Reaching the right target market – demographics

Facebook lets you target your audience using some very precise targeting tools. You can choose from:

location
demographic
language

and you then get to delve into the keywords that people use to describe what they like.

Reaching the right target market – likes and interests

If your target market should be into fashion, it might be that they include words like ‘fashion’ and ‘clothes’ in their interests, so make sure you add them. But also try adding brand names too, even if they compete with your own. As you type your keywords, Facebook will make suggestions – so where relevant try to include those too.

Reaching the right market – Connections

Within Facebook, you can choose to target particular people who are only connected to a group or Facebook page that you look after, which means that you can actively reach out to your current audience.

Unless you’ve got a new product and want to get people back to your page or site, you might consider this a waste of money, so try excluding users with this connection.

Another option is to target ‘friends of connections’, so that your will be reaching out to those users who are connected to people that are already fans of your Facebook page. This is a really powerful feature: your users have probably mentioned you and your products in passing, which will have spiked their friend’s interest. When they see your ad, it acts to jog the memory and get them to your site. You’ve reached that user through word of mouth AND advertising, and they will be much more likely to buy.

Testing

The great thing about having so many targeting options is that you can test the performance of one audience against another. If you’re not sure whether you want to target web designers or web developers, then set up identical campaigns, creatives and targeting options but focus one around web designers and the other for web developers. Then measure the results you get from each.

This example is just a simple A/B, but the chances are that you have lots of different targeting options to test. Sketch out all the different options and go through testing each one.

This might seem laborious, but the prize is large: If you crack Facebook as an advertising platform, the potential to scale is huge.

Do you like my advertising?

You may have noticed that it’s possible for users to ‘like’ adverts without actually clicking on them. Aside from adding that advertiser to the list of likes within a users’ profile, it’s not completely clear what it means to an advertiser whose adverts are ‘liked’. Facebook themselves don’t say, but the chances are that if not already, it will have an impact on a ‘quality score’ that means your advert has a greater chance of being shown, and at a lower CPC.

Given this, ask your friends or followers to ‘like’ the ad if they see it – you may see the benefits later on.

That’s it

Facebook advertising can offer you the potential to reach a huge audience with some quite advanced targeting tools. Follow this guide to give you campaigns a good start. Think I’ve missed something? Leave us a comment below.

Posted in Display, Social Media | No Comments »

Welcome back to Euston Digital

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

You’re probably reading this text because you’ve clicked on one of our adverts.

Last time you were on our website we attached a cookie to your browser, telling us which pages you visited.

We then used Google Remarketing to reach you when you were off doing other things online.

We can use Remarketing to get users back to your website too.

If you want find out more about Remarkeitng, or if you want to stop seeing our adverts (we can do that too!), get in touch.

Tags: remarketing, retargeting
Posted in Conversion Optimisation, Display | No Comments »

Google AdWords Display Exam: Euston Digital is the 1st agency to pass

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Back in 2003 Google launched their Google Adwords professionals program. Euston Digital took the exam on the first day, becoming the first UK agency to gain AdWords professional status.

Euston Digital have done it again

We’ve now taken part in a new exam Beta designed to test applicants on their ability to make the best use of Google’s growing list of display advertising tools.

Google published the results today. The pass rate is 70%. Euston Digital achieved 96%.

Commenting today Nick Leech said: “In the last 24 months Google have massively increased their ability to deliver effect display advertising for response led customers. They’re keen to make sure agencies can make best use of these tools for their clients. We’ve demonstrated that Euston Digital are on the leading edge of this exciting new area”

Google content campaigns  now include:

*Keyword based content

*Placement targeted

*Placement and keyword targeted

*Audience targeted

*Audience, placement and keyword targeted

*Google Remarketing

*Remarketing and audience targeted

*YouTube promoted videos

*YouTube pre and post roll, and in-video

*YouTube overlays and transparencies

*Video ads on third party publishers

To find out how Euston Digital can boost your display advertising campaigns, get in touch.

Posted in Display, PPC | No Comments »