5 Tips for Scaling a Profitable Campaign on the GDN

Looking to scale a profitable Google Display Network (GDN) campaign? This should help!

Here are 5 tips we have used to scale our clients' campaigns.

1. Use Full Set of Image Ad Sizes and Ad Types Allowed By Google

Most people start with one or two ad sizes even though Google offers a wide variety. Once your campaign is profitable, it is in your best interest to expand to different ad sizes to allow for more placement opportunities.

Advertisers also generally start with text ads as they are much easier to create and set up. Text ads, however, get a lower CPA. We highly recommend using all types of ads (i.e. text, image, html5, and responsive ads).

2. Expand Geographical Areas

When most advertisers set up their campaigns, they select one or two countries to target. We recommend expanding to all countries that speak the same language as your funnel or countries with similar characteristics. For example, you can research indexes that rank countries based on a specific secondary language skill set and expand geographical areas accordingly.

3. Use Automatic Bidding

Once campaigns have a decent CPA, use Google automatic bidding tools (i.e. DCO, Target CPA), if you don’t have a proprietary bidding technology. Bear in mind that the Target CPA bidding tool requires a decent CPA and 30 conversions within the last 30 days.

4. Delivery Method

Once campaigns are stable, change delivery method from “standard” to “accelerate” so that the algorithm will spend faster.

5. Make Sure You Are Not Losing Impression Share

Find out what your impression share is by adding relevant metrics to your Adwords dashboard.

Columns<Customize columns<Competitive metrics

Add: Display Impr. share, Display Lost IS (rank), and Display Lost IS (budget)

This will show you what percentage of traffic the campaign is eligible to target but is not reaching. The cause could be low budget or ad rank. Budget is easy to fix but ad rank requires improving CTR or increasing your bid.

We hope you found this article helpful. If you have any questions or need some extra advice, feel free to contact us!