-
Struggling with custom audiences for display ads
Posted by on August 25, 2021 at 12:15 pmHi marketers, I’ve had a ton of success with search, YouTube, and remarketing ads but I cannot crack display ads for my niche music business.
I have set up a Custom Audience with a set of extremely niche search terms (roughly 100) under “People who searched for any of the terms on Google” that should target my audience perfectly. Google estimates 50m-100m weekly impressions in the US, which is way more than it likely should be.
Either way, I trusted the targeting and set up a display campaign only to receive a 95% bounce rate vs my 47% for search. I don’t have any exclusions except location is United States. I’m very sure that my audience isn’t being targeted properly so my question is, what am I doing something wrong? Are Custom Audiences useable for highly niche industries (less than 5 million people worldwide)?
Thanks
-
2 Replies
-
You’ll never get the same results on Display than what you have on Search. Search campaigns are ultra relevant to the users, they searched for it. Display is a work of awareness, you just want impressions but don’t expect quality traffic so much. One thing you have to realize is that Display banners always get clicked accidentally, so people bounce right away because they didn’t mean to click on it.
What you could do, as a first step of improvement, is optimizing your placements. Depending on your industry, I would take off all placements on any sort of mobile games or apps. They are most of the time more annoying to the user than anything, and you’ll get a LOT of bounces coming out of them.
-
Never trust the targeting for Display. There are about a half a dozen settings that will funnel most of your budget into junk clicks. You’re biggest mistake is exclusions. Do the following & you’ll see a much improved bounce rate and hopefully some good performance…
1. Exclude ALL Mobile App Categories (every single one, all 141). Go into ad group settings, placements, and check all the different categories for every device.
2. Exclude a “News” and “Games” topics. Traffic from these topics is usually junk because it’s either flash-based game sites (yikes) or sensational news that uses click arbitrage for low quality traffic.
3. If you are using manual bidding, lower device bids (device adjustments) for mobile and tablet. If you are using Max Conversions, then you can likely leave it but you might be better off starting with Manual CPC.
4. Completely turn off Targeting Expansion in the ad group settings. If this is a new campaign, you might see it as “optimized targeting” – turn this off.Display takes work. Once you do all this, then let it spend for a few days and keep an eye on your metrics. You should see better CTR and lower bounce rate at least. But once it spends a bit, then you should dig into the Placements to see where most of your spend is going. Be wary of any abnormally high CTR placements (>10% is waaay to high and likely bots). I usually start excluding placements once they spend 4x my CPA goal without any conversions.
If you’ve got demographic data from your Search & YouTube campaigns, then you can likely make bid adjustments or exclusions based on that data to squeeze out some more performance.
Hope that helps!
Log in to reply.