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Here is how to make your GDN campaigns profitable
Tired of FRAUDULENT Google Display spend? Here is how to make your GDN campaigns profitable in less than 2 weeks.
Bit of background: Before starting my own agency I had worked 10 years in-house for a large software company that spent a considerable amount of budget on Google Display. Because of this, I got the opportunity to play around quite a bit with various tactics to figure out what works and what doesn't.
The truth? If you don't follow very specific tactics, you will waste most of your budget on fraudulent clicks, from low quality placements.
Want to avoid that? Follow these steps:
- The first thing you were going to want to do is download your historical placement data using an all-time date range. Make sure you are getting the data from all campaigns including paused and deleted ones.
- After downloading it and opening excel, put the data into a pivot table. Filter for only placements that have greater than 0 conversions. These are the only ones we care about. You need to make sure that a 'conversion' is something valuable, not like a page visit that can easily be botted.
- Start a NEW display campaign, using the 'maximize conversions' bid strategy, and a small budget of no more than $50 – $100.
- For the targeting, you will ONLY want to use placement targeting. Paste your entire list of placements into one ad group, name it something like 'converted placements'.
- Add an additional layer of targeting on top of these placements, which should be a handful of core term keywords.
- For the ad itself (most important), use your historical data to determine your top performers and start with that. This is usually a mix of CTR and conversion rate that you will want to be looking at when assessing performance.
- Let the campaign run for two full weeks undisturbed. After this time you should slowly start increasing your campaign budget .
- Eventually you will want to scale to a much higher budget. At this point, you MUST implement a CPA Target because 'Maximize conversions' gets very wasteful on high budget campaigns with no target attached.
That's the process! This only works with large accounts that have a significant amount of historical display spend (which is honestly most corporations), not so much small businesses.
"But… but… I'm a new business and don't have any historical display data to draw from."
Well, fear not! I have another tactic for this type of account, and it involves running a Google Ads script that sends the placements (hourly) to a Google Sheet.
Within the Google Sheet, a secondary Apps Script assesses the PageRank score of each placement using an API that calls upon a service called "Open PageRank." They give a free API key that allow you to scan up to 10,000 placements per hour.
Once you have all the PageRank scores for each placement, go ahead and filter for all placements greater than a ranking of 6. You should be left with a much smaller list (most names you will probably even recognize). These publishers are very big and aren't going to risk their AdSense account by engaging in click fraud, and they don't need to anyways. Add these placements into a secondary campaign and then exclude them from the main one. The idea is to have a very low budget campaign used for mining new placements, and a secondary campaign that contains those placements that you will scale up over time.
The best targeting for new display campaigns without any historical data is the bullseye 'in-market audience' for your business, combined with a few contextual targeted keywords. I've tested many other setups, but nothing beats it (aside from remarketing obviously)
Follow these steps, and you will find yourself with Display campaigns that, at the very minimum, have a break-even ROAS. Most of mine are around 1.15 to 1.20. Is this amazing compared to other campaign types? No, it is on the low end. Is it amazing for Display? Absolutely. And it is all incremental growth – people who have likely never heard of you!
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1 Reply
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Never seen something like this before. Sounds like a good tactic!
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When was the last time you purchased something from a static programmatic ad? I rest my case.
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Using CTR to evaluate display performance is really short-sighted considering the weight of view-through actions for display campaigns.
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For many years, we’d cull poor performers via excluding their domain. For the last 5 years or so though, every month when I pull a list of performance by domain, and look it at, any domains that have been performing poorly have already be devalued by the algorithm (we run on tROAS) and aren’t getting any ad volume. So we do this type of optimizing a lot less frequently now.
I do like the PageRank observation, and I would guess that does correlate pretty strongly with legitimacy and conversion.
Not sure I like targeting domains in general, we do this when an entire site is dedicated to our niche, but sometimes a site might have only a part dedicated to our niche, in which case we wouldn’t want to target it broadly. I’m a little afraid that selecting individual domains and laying on keyword/contextual targeting will end up with a campaign that can’t spend much, even if those domains have a lot of traffic.
I think it’s a little specific to our niche, but we’ve tested a lot of creative, and the best thing for us is very eye-catching animated gifs. Those seem to drive the clicks to us, and our site does the rest to convert. Static images have never done that well for us.
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Now do one for pmax for ecommerce please! I am struggling with 1+ ROAS, it was 3 previously and I could not get it up again.
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Had an old agency colleague for a alcohol store client who used GDN to get people to mark their calendars to come to the site (directly) on a certain day for a promotion. Plan was for people to not need to click.
Spent something like $200 on clicks for tens of millions of views and decent sales.
Our Google rep at the time was PISSED. Threatened all kinds of account suspensions but he chilled eventually because no rules were broken.
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Damn. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. 🏆
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Thank you for sharing. Could you provide a link to a script for this approach?
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All your doing is targeting the bots which made fake conversions
This should be retitled how to definitely waste your money on GDN
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Thanks for sharing these detailed steps on making GDN campaigns profitable! Your experience really shows, and the tactics seem very practical. I especially appreciate the advice on using historical data and targeting high-quality placements to avoid fraudulent clicks. For those who don’t have historical data, the Google Ads script and PageRank approach is a clever solution. One question though, how often do you reassess and update your placements to ensure continued effectiveness? Great tips overall! 👍
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What would stop bots from clicking on your ads and submitting a form or calling?
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Only way to prove it’s genuine is to turn on CPM bidding baby.
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Trying today. Will report back
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What do you count a – score as in Open Page Rank? Less than 1? Or do exclude them until they are ranked?
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If most of your display conversions come from retargeting campaigns, which is the case for most google ad accounts, you will need to be careful with this tactic. The conversion is more about the audience than the placement in those cases.
If you’re already spending a lot on display, you separate new and returning traffic and your conversion point is sufficiently difficult to find this approach may work well for you!
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