By Helen Brown
When using the Display network to advertise it is very important to think about how to best reach your audience, and decide the most appropriate way you can get the attention of these valuable Internet users. The Display network features some comprehensive and in depth targeting options and earlier on in the year Google launched topic targeting on the display network. Using this targeting feature will further aid us in gaining the attention of users, by means of selecting topics and sub topics for targeting our ads. Using topic targeting will enable you to show your ads to a broader audience and get your advertising message across more quickly, compared to keyword contextual targeting alone, where the serving of your ads is based on your list of chosen keywords. It allows your ad to be matched to the subject matter of a page and not just specific wording . However, as this will most probably cause an increase in your ads delivery and traffic to your site, it is important to take this into consideration in terms of your campaigns budget. You can also choose to exclude certain topics if you want to ensure that your ads are not served on pages with certain topics, or if you find that some of your chosen topics are not performing well.
The topic of a web page is determined by a ‘crawler’ analysing the keywords and the frequency in which they are used, where on the page the words are placed and the font sizes, and also the language of the page plays a part too! As the crawler searches a page, targeting will be at the page level and not at the site level. An important thing to remember is that some topics can be quite diverse on a page, as pages can contain multiple topics. This is where you will need to think about topic exclusions, so that you can ensure that your ads are appearing for only the most relevant pages. To get an idea of where to start with topic exclusions, you can view your reporting section of your account.
There are a wide variety of topics to target (or exclude should you wish) with over 1750 topics and sub topics to choose from.
In terms of setting up contextual targeting by topic, its very simple. Within your campaigns tab, you will see a sub tab ‘Topics’. (If you don’t see this, click the menu drop down at the end of this row and select ‘Topics: Display network only’ and click apply.) After clicking the ‘Topics’ sub tab, you will need to click the box ‘add topics’. You will then be presented with a list of topics and sub topics to choose from by clicking ‘add’, or you can search in the search box located at the top of the list. Google advise to remember that if you click the top level topic, this will add all of the sub level topics too. If you wish to remove a topic, you can do so by clicking ‘remove’ or ‘remove all’ as appropriate. Some of the advised best practices when starting with topic targeting are to start a separate campaign for your topics in order to allow ease of control over your budget. If you wish to have in depth reporting it is a good idea to include sub topics within the topics, and also ensure that your topics and sub-topics are relevant to your ads. If you want precision with your targeting, use topics and keywords together. Always remember to save your chosen topics.
If you wish to exclude topics that are not performing well after analysing your reporting statistics, or if they are unsuitable for your advertising needs, this action can be taken at the campaign and the ad group level. There is a button beneath the ‘add topics’ section in your account labelled ‘exclusions’, click this and then ‘add exclusions’. You will be presented with two boxes, one for ad group level and one for campaign level, where you can exclude your chosen topics and sub topics as necessary.
During the webinar it was discussed that ad planner is considered a good way of getting inspiration for choosing topics, as it is great way of learning about your target audience. Go to http://google.com/adplanner and you can start to search a wealth of valuable information. There are two tabs available after opening the tool -
Search by site: There is so much to be learned from this page from traffic statistics to demographic information just from entering your sites URL, but of particular interest will be the ‘sites also visited’ and the ‘audiences interests’ sections of this page, as they can be used to detail your audiences online activity and this could be a great help in terms of thinking about choosing topics.
Search by audience: This is a good way of defining your audience by means of selecting the geographical area in which they are located, their language, different demographics from age, gender and household income etc. Also you can enter sites that your audience is likely to visit and keywords that you think they are likely to use search as this online behaviour is useful to better understand your audience. Its also possible to filter the site results you will get as ad planner does show statistics for any site on the Internet. Therefore you can choose to select ‘In Google Display Network’ under Add Items > Site Characteristics. You can also filter the results to show for sites that are related to a specific topic.
When the site results are returned to you, there will be a lot of information to consider and digest, from placements to page views and reach % etc. As the focus of the webinar was topics, Google advised to focus on the category column for the site theme as this is a good way of getting ideas for topics for your chosen audience.
However you choose to target your campaigns there are extensive options available, I hope this post is useful to anyone who wants to try topic targeting on the Google Display Network. Good luck!
