- 01
Decide what Display is for on this account
Reminding people who already came, or reaching people who have not heard of you. They need different audiences, different creative and different measures of success, and running them in one campaign hides both.
- 02
Exclude the inventory nobody meant to buy
Mobile app categories, parked domains, and the content types you would not want your name beside. This happens before launch, not after the first report shows where the money went.
- 03
Build the audience from behaviour, not guesswork
Your own visitor lists split by what they looked at, custom segments built from the searches your customers actually make, and in-market segments for people already shopping. Interests come last, if at all.
- 04
Turn off the settings that spend outside your targeting
Google enables optimised targeting by default and it reaches beyond the audience you picked. On a remarketing campaign that defeats the point. We switch it off, then bring it back deliberately if there is a reason to.
- 05
Produce the whole asset set, at every crop
Both image ratios, both logo shapes, five headlines, the long headline, five descriptions, the business name inside 25 characters. A half-filled asset set is a half-sized ad on most placements.
- 06
Cap the frequency and set a recency window
A ceiling on how often one person sees you in a day and a week, and a rule that stops showing the ad once someone is past the point where it helps. Reminding is useful. Following people is not.
- 07
Exclude the people who already said yes
Converters, existing customers, and for online stores everyone who has already bought — so the cart-abandonment ad talks only to the carts that were actually abandoned. This is a list, and it needs maintaining.
- 08
Separate view-through from click-through before launch
Someone who saw the banner on Tuesday and searched your name on Friday is a real outcome, but it is not a click. Put the two in one column and you cannot tell what Display did, so we split them from day one.
- 09
Prune the placement report every week
We open the list of sites, apps and channels your ads actually ran on, exclude the waste, and give the placements producing enquiries their own campaign. It is the least glamorous job on a Display account and the biggest lever on cost.
- 10
Move the bidding once there is something to bid on
We bid on impressions while a campaign is only being seen, then move to conversion-based bidding once there are real actions to aim at. We follow the budget to whichever audience is producing, and the rest gets cut.