Are Google display ads effective?
This completely depends on your objective, but personally I believe yes.
Display is excellent if you want to target people who don’t know you yet, or who are not yet searching for your product or solution. Because of Google’s ability to target users who meet the criteria you set, if you have a good understanding of your prospects you can fill your website quickly with highly targeted traffic in the right geographical regions.
The caveat is that because display users aren’t yet searching for your products or service, they are less likely to turn into revenue immediately. This makes Display traffic less valuable than Search traffic. But, if you can work out your conversion rates and cost per acquisition, you can pay much less for Display traffic and get a really good return on investment. Display traffic is much cheaper per click than Search traffic and so you can get conversions for a much smaller budget. This is helpful for small businesses because they can target very tightly and keep their budget low.
The trick with Display traffic is that it doesn’t usually turn into transactions immediately, so you need a way to stay in touch with these users over the long haul.
One way to do this includes remarketing to these people through Google, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube or other social marketing channels. Another way may be to send Display traffic to landing pages where they can subscribe to receive a PDF or access gated materials. Then you can follow up with them via email or telephone.
You can use Google Display to stay in touch with your remarketing audiences. It doesn’t need to be in a creepy, stalkery kind of way. You can distribute blog posts and other content marketing to your remarketing audiences so that you build trust over time. You’ll want to build a 540-day remarketing list so that you can continue to touch base with these users with helpful articles, videos and gated content. By default Google only gives you 30 days which isn’t likely to give you enough runway.
Display is really valuable for marketing events or services where Search advertising would just be too expensive. For example, Search advertising isn’t very good for Food and Beverage marketing because your margins would be significantly eroded due to the marketing cost. Using display however, you only pay when someone clicks on the ad. There will be 50–100X more people who see the ad compared to those who click on it, and those people may become customers in time.
You can also use Google Display to scale ecommerce shopping campaigns by remarketing to people who have abandoned their carts, or by showing individual products to users who might be interested in them.
Finally, display ads are very effective if your goal is to build brand awareness and you don’t care about immediate conversions. If you’re a big business and you want to get a lot of reach, you can do so quickly with google Display. With over 2 million websites in Google Display Network you can get a lot of exposure.
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