Save Money by Assessing Display Campaign Placement Performance in Google Ads

Learn to save some money on your Google Ads display campaigns by using these three simple tips to assess and optimize placement performance.

This is part of regular account management and should be looked at frequently to ensure your display ads are not serving in places which are not likely to produce leads or sales for your business.

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Video Transcription

0:06
Hey everyone, this is Kelly. I’m one of the analysts
0:08
here at Main Street ROI. We love to help
0:12
businesses with their digital marketing
0:13
and we do that through our marketing tip
0:16
videos today’s marketing tip video is
0:19
about how to assess your placement
0:22
performance in your display campaigns to
0:24
first of all reduce wasted ad spend and
0:28
then also to optimize and make sure that
0:32
you’re spending money on placements that
0:34
are getting you uh the conversions that
0:36
you would you need as well as getting
0:39
the right people to your website so I do
0:42
have one of our our clients here pulled
0:45
up in Google ads so the first thing that
0:48
you’ll want to do to assess the
0:51
placement performance here is you can go
0:55
to your display campaign that you want
0:58
to actually
0:59
investigate or you can just do an
1:02
overall account View
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so if you scroll down to the content tab
1:10
here you can see there are several
1:14
options you have
1:17
um
1:18
placements you have your keywords
1:22
exclusions
1:23
and where ADS showed so we’re going to
1:27
go over three different things to look
1:29
at in order to save money on your
1:32
display campaigns and make sure that you
1:35
are putting your advertising dollars in
1:37
the right place so if you go to
1:39
placements we’ll do that first
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you can see this is on the YouTube and
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Display Network this list of placements
1:48
now I’m looking at the all-time
1:50
placements for this particular account
1:52
so there are quite a bit in here uh
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they’re I think it’s like over forty
1:58
thousand or something but that’s okay so
2:01
you can narrow this down and it will
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help you to get a better idea of what
2:07
you’re looking at so if you go to
2:09
Performance we can narrow this down by
2:12
clicks let’s just say we want to only
2:15
look at a placement that has given us
2:18
about 50 clicks or more so you can put
2:20
in your filter for over 50 clicks
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and go ahead and apply that
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and then
2:30
well
2:32
that’s not working well that’s because
2:35
we don’t actually have over 50 Clicks in
2:37
this particular account for the
2:39
placements now placements usually these
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are direct placements that you would uh
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set up on the campaign so these are
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websites that you tell Google to put
2:51
your ads on I believe we experimented
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with this a little bit but it didn’t
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really Garner the results that we wanted
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so we didn’t have too much data that we
3:00
could go through
3:02
um in this particular account but that’s
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one way to look at your placements now
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another way to look at the placements
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is to go to where ADS showed
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and then we can put in our filter here
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and basically everything that I’m going
3:20
to do on the wheread showed dashboard
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you can do the same thing in the in the
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placements dashboard so we can do the
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same thing I was doing before we can go
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to clicks and we’ll filter that by let’s
3:32
say 50 clicks or more
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once that loads you’ll see that we can
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we can actually sort this a number of
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ways you can sort it by the conversion
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rate you can insert it sort it by the
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cost on how much you’re spending on
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specific
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um placements you can also do the cost
3:53
per conversion which is another one that
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I like to do just so that we have a
3:57
better idea of you know how many
3:59
conversions are we getting is this like
4:01
three times the amount of our average
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cost per cons per conversion in other
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campaigns or is this like super
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affordable per conversion you know we
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want to have an idea of how this is is
4:14
in comparison to the other campaigns
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that we’re running
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so for now we’ll just filter this by the
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total cost
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so we can see that yes this one has
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spent the most out of all of the other
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placements listed here however we do
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have 92 conversions for lead form
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submissions on this particular placement
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um
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now this is
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one of the apps available I guess by
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T-Mobile
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and the next one below this you can see
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that we have another app here and
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there’s 10 conversions there now these
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are a little bit higher I mean a lot
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higher should I say at 72 dollars in
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comparison to eight dollars uh however
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the the average conversion in this
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account uh hovers anywhere between two
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hundred dollars to four hundred dollars
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per conversion so even though it is much
5:15
higher than this other one here it’s
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still a very good cost per conversion
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for this particular client
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now another thing that you can do see
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there’s a there’s a placement here that
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has the word game in it so you can
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actually filter these placements by the
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actual attribute so you can actually go
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down to placement and then you can do
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placement contains
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and you can say uh let’s just say like
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we just saw their game you can put game
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here
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uh you could also put
5:58
um like weather just in case like
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there’s a weather app and people aren’t
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clicking on it
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so as you can see we do have weather.com
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and
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there are conversions coming from that
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particular placement so in this case the
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conversion rate is actually pretty high
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it’s a 18
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we want to keep that there’s also
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accuweather.com now some of these others
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are mobile apps so
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usually when someone’s looking at the
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weather on their mobile app they just
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want to quickly get an idea of what
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they’re looking at for the day and then
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be on their way
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more often than not it’s disruptive to
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what they were trying to do and they are
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not going to respond to the ad very well
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so as you can see here we’ve got 58
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clicks there 58 clicks here 76 94 75 and
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none of these have actually produced a
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conversion for us so to reduce our spend
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on this particular account
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we’ll want to go ahead and exclude these
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and forgive me I gotta move my
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camera all right
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so you can check these off
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and then go to edit and you can go to
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exclude from the campaign
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now another place that you can check is
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the exclusions here
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let me move my
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Okay so we’ve already excluded games for
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the snowbirds display campaign that we
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had running I’ve just you know more
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often than not when I look at games uh
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performance as far as apps on mobile
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phones
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nine times out of ten it’s a lot of
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clicks and very little conversions
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because people are in the middle of the
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game the ad pops up they accidentally
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click on it they go to the landing page
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for that ad and then they just back
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right out and go back to their game and
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they’re kind of irritated I just want to
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play my game so more often than not I
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will just exclude games from those
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display campaigns uh just from the jump
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so it may be different depending on what
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industry you’re in for instance if you
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actually created another app or game
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that’s relevant to the gaming industry
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then that might be a totally different
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scenario and games might actually make
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sense for you to include in your
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placements
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um so another thing that we can look at
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is the topic exclusions so if you
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um
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if you don’t want to exclude games you
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can actually go in here and you can
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exclude other things so for instance
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there are
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various topics that you can choose from
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where you may not want your ads to be
9:00
shown and it can be different depending
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on each client and what their
9:06
preferences are it can also just depend
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on their industry
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some some people
9:12
um
9:13
would be better off seeing your ads in
9:16
certain settings than others so you may
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just want to exclude certain topics for
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that reason
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if you have any kind of sensitive topics
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of course you want to exclude those as
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well
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and then
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um pets and animals is another one but
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anyhow that’s not really important
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there’s a lot of stuff that you could
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choose from in here to exclude and
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that’s just up to each preference for
9:42
for your particular scenario so you can
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explore that
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and
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there are other things like nursery
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rhymes that you’ll want to look out for
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and I can go back to where ADS showed I
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I almost forgot to mention that
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um I I noticed that there were
10:02
um
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YouTube nursery rhyme channels showing
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up in the placements so for instance
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just with the same uh with the same
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filter that I used before
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I can just go in here and we could say
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rhymes
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so for instance cocoa melon Coco melon
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nursery rhymes
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it’s interesting that we actually see
10:30
some lead form submissions showing up
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from this particular placement
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but more often than not these nursery
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rhyme YouTube channels are just kind of
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playing in the background and no one is
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actually engaging with that with that ad
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um if if they are seeing the ad it’s
10:49
from another room sometimes you know so
10:52
you’re not actually going to get a lot
10:53
of Engagement there this was an
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exception we did see some lead form
10:58
submissions and they’re not too
10:59
expensive of either so we’re just going
11:02
to leave it alone here but what I will
11:04
say is that it’s not always the case
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just keep an eye on things like that
11:08
there are various ways that you can
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exclude YouTube channels from your
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campaigns you can do it at the YouTube
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channel level and then you can also do
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it at the topic level so just keep that
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in mind I hope you found this video
11:23
helpful we have a lot of other content
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out there for you to help you out and to
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optimize your campaigns and if you found
11:31
it useful we do have a free Google ads
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checklist that you can download here at
11:37
the end of this video and thank you for
11:40
watching we’ll catch you on the next one