Decide where you ads are displayed for more narrow targeting and effective results measurement.
The websites and blogs which make up the Google Display Network (GDN) are prime real estate for advertisers. Nobody knows your business and your target market better than you do so why not choose websites to advertise on which you know retains traffic from the people in your audience.
Managed placements is the AdWords feature which allows you to choose specific websites in the GDN to show your display ads on, rather than letting automatic placements decide where to display your ads based on a less specific specifications.
If you are in business, chances are you have conducted quite a bit of market research over time and have a rather accurate idea of where your target market are spending the bulk of their time online. You probably know which blogs they are reading and which forums they are engaging with. Why not use this to your advantage and hone in on the users that have real value to you rather than using the old ‘Plaster your ad in front of as many people as possible’ branding techniques which your conservative competitors are probably still using. Why should branding be any less targeted than direct response marketing? Spending marketing dollars where you are unlikely to measure a decent return is never a good investment.
Luckily, AdWords have given advertisers the option of running managed placements in conjunction with automatic placements. This allows us build our list of high performing managed placements after determining which of the automatic placements are performing the best, and move those placements into managed placements to be individually optimised.
Can I target placements down to a specific page on a website?
Yes, an entire website is not considered to be one placement. That would make it harder to get the most from your marketing dollars. AdWords allow advertisers to target a specific page, post, category or even a specific ad block (placement) within any given section of the site. If you are placing ads on a small niche blog than this probably won’t be a great help to you (although you should still run some A/B tests across various areas of any site). However if you are targeting a large blog with many unique categories, you are likely to only achieve a decent return by setting managed placements on specific posts and/or categories.
What is the difference between placement targeting and contextual targeting?
As you know, placement targeting is when you use extensive market research to select web pages to display your ads on. Contextual targeting is a whole different ball game.
In a similar fashion to search marketing, with contextual targeting an advertiser will add keywords and/or topics at the ad group level. The AdWords system then ads seeks suitable websites on which to serve your ads based on the information you have supplied to it.
Using the placements tool
You can use the placements tool to search for placement ideas that will help you receive targeted traffic from more of the relevant in the Google Display Network. The tools does not just tell you which placements may be relevant to your business, product or service, it is able to comprehensively show you which of its recommended placements will support various formats of advertising. Use this information to determine where you want to show your display ads.
Data Columns: Upon completing your placements search, you will be shown placements with lists of their placements types and the formats of ads they support.
