What is the Reach of the Google Display Network? Learn Strategies to Increase Brand’s Reach

Do you wish to improve your advertising strategy and maximize your brand’s reach? Placing your advertisements on a big website might seem like a challenging and costly task.

Google Display Network (GDN) can be an effective way to generate new leads, increase sales conversions, and boost customer loyalty. The big question is: what is the reach of the Google Display Network?

In this blog, we’ll explore this area and take a look at how GDN can help you maximize your reach in paid advertising.

Understanding Reach in Google Display Network

In GDN, reach is the number of possible impressions that fit within your targeting settings. Typically, every time you include a new layer of targeting, you further narrow down your advertisements’ potential reach.

For instance, if you set up targeting for males actively looking to purchase a home (i.e., “Demographics: Gender: Male” “Audience: In-market: Real Estate”), your ads will have a limited reach than if you target all individuals in-market for real estate.

In Google Display Network, reach metrics automatically appear on the right side of the screen when you start a new campaign. You can experience your reach estimates varying as you change your settings and targeting.

However, keep in mind that reach estimates don’t take into account all advertiser info. Google Ads utilizes a combination of factors to calculate the potential reach, including:

• Location
• Language
• Devices
• Ad scheduling
• Frequency capping
• Keywords
• Site category options
• Placements
• Mobile app categories
• Topics
• Audiences (remarketing, interest categories, custom combinations, age, and gender)
• Ad formats and sizes

Reach estimates are based on the past info and do not reflect seasonal trends or the latest shifts in the number of websites and webpages accessible on the GDN moreover it doesn’t use the following information to calculate the reach:

• Budget
• Bid
• Quality Score
• Ad extensions
• Advanced location targeting by radius
• Automated targeting

How Google Ads Calculates the Reach

The reach estimates you see do not reflect the real traffic your advertisements will receive. Instead, these are estimates depending on your settings and targeting options. In years gone by, Google Ads relied on cookies to calculate reach. But nowadays, the reach can be calculated using aggregate data across several devices.

Owing to this difference in the calculation, you can’t compare the data showing up in your new reach report with that from a past report. You can also use reach estimates to observe when there isn’t sufficient inventory for your selection or if your targeting is extremely limited (for instance, if you’ve added too many targeting methods to your ad group).

Using reach estimates, you can modify your settings and targeting. For example, you can eliminate content targeting if your reach is too restrictive. Your actual number of impressions also relies on other aspects, such as your bid and ad quality.

How GDN is Helpful in Advertisement?

With search advertisements, you’re attracting an audience that is actively searching your targeted keywords naturally. As a result, the chances of conversion are high.

On the flip side, display ads allow you to show ads to users who aren’t actively searching for your keywords. They react to your ads as they browse through different sites, blogs, apps, or watch videos.

The GDN provides you with a chance to get consumers while they’re active online. You can reach them as they are using various apps, devices, and sites. In doing this, Google Display ads can help you target the right users to generate a higher return on investment (ROI) for your business. The network utilizes different factors, like images and deep linking, to create a better advertising network for your brand.

As per Google, GDN can reach more than 90% of internet users worldwide, which means GDN gives you access to a much larger audience than other networks.

Therefore, Google’s display ad network deserves more of your time than any other channel. Display ads can help you market your brand when users are surfing online, viewing YouTube videos, checking Gmail, or using mobile devices and apps. You have to follow these three steps:

Google Display Network helps you to:

• Reach your consumers at the right time across all devices, including mobile, tablet, and desktop.
• Market your business with a range of engaging ad formats.
• Generate demand by putting your message in front of your target users.
• Modify- manually or automatically- with a variety of tools for maximum outcomes.

Benefits of Google Display Network

The GDN is intended to help you reach the right users at the right time. You can grab somebody’s attention earlier in the purchasing process, reaching them before they even begin looking for your product or service. This approach enables you to impact your prospect before your competitors do. It’s an act that can be significant in your overall marketing strategy.

Display advertisements are economical as each cost per click (CPC) for brand awareness. Whether you’re a small company with a limited marketing budget or a bigger organization seeking to invest in several campaigns, using Google Ads is an affordable option.

Moreover, leveraging the power of visual images, digital ads allows you to better establish your business and keep your brand on top of mind with your customers. You can attract consumers via a variety of dynamic, engaging advertisement designs. This strategy includes:

• Responsive display ads – Allow Google to automatically test different combinations of headlines, images, descriptions, and logos, and then display the best-performing combination.
• Uploaded image ads – You can design images outside of Google and upload multiple file types into the platform.
• Engagement ads – Use the same flexible targeting options as regular display campaigns.
• Gmail ads – Appear in the Promotions and Social tabs of your inbox and, when opened, may expand just like an email.

Out of all the advantages display advertisements offer, the capability to target users with great specificity may be the most useful in boosting ROI. Businesses who target a niche market by topic, interest, demographic, and even location can witness an increase in lead generation and sales.

Ways to Reach the Right Audience Using Google Display Advertising

By Location

Location targeting in Google Ads allows your advertisements to show up in the geographic locations you select. This includes countries, areas within a country, a radius around a location, or location groups.

It helps you concentrate your advertising on the areas where you’ll find the right customers and limit it in areas where you won’t. When you’ve found your ideal users, it’s time to consider ways you want to reach them.

By Keywords

Always localize and ensure your keywords are natural to your audience. Also, consider key differences in dialect. It’s a great idea to choose keywords relevant to an entire ad group and not just one ad.

Google Ads uses contextual targeting to find an audience interested in your brand and more likely to take action.

Consider including English as an additional language to target if you wish to increase your reach in your desired region. Google also matches the keywords in your display ad campaign to websites with high conversion rates that offer products and services complementary to yours.

Consequently, your ad is displayed on websites customers use to search for things similar to the products and services you offer. This increases your pool of prospective consumers and improves your probability of conversion.

By Placements

Within the Display Network, you can choose kinds of web pages or particular websites for your advertisements, as well as audiences, to display your ads.

You can display your advertisement on particular web pages, online videos, games, and mobile sites and apps of your choice with these manual placements. You can even block your ads from sites that you don’t think are relevant.

By Activity

Due to the cookies, the GDN can tell when customers browse specific web pages, fill out a form, buy an item, abandon their shopping cart, or perform some other action on your website. You can use this info to maximize your ad spend.

With a remarketing strategy, you can reach your previous visitors – those you know have a real interest in your business. You can use targeted messaging to draw them in again.

Remarketing is one of the oldest and most effective online advertising strategies. If you don’t know where to start doing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, begin with remarketing. Prospective customers reach your website and could be indecisive. Remarketing will help your business stay on top of their mind.

By Interest

As the name suggests, interest targeting enables you to display your advertisement to users interested in your products and services or those who participate in activities relevant to your brand.

You can select from the following three categories of interest targeting:

Affinity Audience

This targeting option includes 80 different groups based on interests or hobbies, like “music fans,” “makeup enthusiasts,” or “fitness freaks.” You can opt to display your advertisements to one or more of these audiences.

Custom Affinity Audience

Create your own custom audience using keywords to narrow your targeting even further. For instance, if you’re running ads for your apparel store, you might use keywords like “blue jeans,” “men blue jeans,” and “blue jeans for men.”

When you set up your custom audiences, your advertisements will be displayed to those visiting sites that include these keywords. You can also include particular URLs that customers might visit, such as jeans.com or jeansworld.com, to target websites where you would like your advertisement to appear.

In-Market Audience

You can identify consumers who are actively looking at products or services similar to yours.

Considering our previous example, the in-market audiences could be consumers who have put blue jeans into their shopping cart while browsing a site or those who have visited several websites related to men’s jeans.

By Demographics

This option enables you to reach individuals who are probably within your chosen age, gender, and parental status demographic group. With audiences, you don’t manually choose sites to display your advertisements.

In this case, the websites or apps where your ads display are called ‘automatic placements.’ You can see them in your statistics table on the Placements tab.

Apart from targeting consumers based on their interests, you may also focus your targeting on demographics. These include:

• Age – “18-24,” “25-34,” “35-44,” “45-54,” “55-64,” “65 or more,” and “Unknown”
• Gender – “Female,” “Male,” and “Unknown”
• Parental status – “Parent,” “Not a Parent,” and “Unknown”

You can combine demographic targeting with affinity audiences and in-market audiences to reach a more targeted and more relevant customer base.

For instance, if you have a sportswear store and want to market your pants designed for yoga, you may focus on the “Parent” demographic group along with affinity groups based on yoga, fitness, and meditation.

You can also omit particular demographic groups from viewing your advertisements. For instance, if you know the majority of your consumers are senior citizens and want to concentrate solely on this segment, you can configure your campaign to omit all age groups except “65 or more”.

Keep in mind that the more particular you are with your targeting, the fewer users will view your advertisements—test different combinations of targeting to observe, which results in the most conversions.

Optimizing GDN Results for Better Reach

You have the fundamental knowledge of how to reach the targeted audience and improve the reach of your display ads. Let’s take a look at how to optimize the GDN results for your ad campaign.

Evaluate Demographic Performance and Recalibrate If Needed

Some of your audience demographics may work perfectly for conventional marketing. However, they could perform poorly in a digital setup. Even after configuring particular demographic and location targeting, you should evaluate the performance of what has not been omitted.

Evaluate Placement Performance for Continuous Improvement

Google makes it easier for you to review where your advertisements appear on an everyday or weekly basis after the campaign launch. Sorting out placements by abnormally high spend or clickthrough rate (CTR) can swiftly identify sites that are an instant risk to your campaign’s health.

When thinking about bulk exclusions, you might find it useful to export web placements within the timeframe of “all time.” Concentrate on blocking the duplicate placements that generate no outcomes as repeat offenders are a higher priority than sites appearing once with just some impressions.

After detecting duplicates, evaluate the relevance of these websites, how much they have spent, and whether they result in conversions.

Consider Ad Style and Location That’ll Produce the Best Results.

There are two primary ad kinds accessible for a GDN campaign, including standard image ads and responsive ads. Standard image advertisements include several formats such as square, rectangular, skyscraper, and banner.

On the other hand, responsive ads offer a combination of text and image options that appear in various formats, depending on where the ad is shown. The complete ad includes three image types, up to five short headlines, one long headline, five descriptions, and a business name. The short headlines and descriptions rotate to identify and display the best-performing combination.

If you have limited time, budget, or creative resources, it can be challenging to know which display ads will perform best for your campaign, and you may not want to waste time trying out different ones.

Research shows that 300 x 250 and 728 x 90 get more impressions than other ad formats. Moreover, half-page ads and large rectangles also get higher CTRs than other ad formats. Therefore, if you’re not sure where to begin, test the rectangular formats and leaderboards.

Tips to Improve Display Network Performance and Reach

To obtain the highest return on your display advertising investment, you must use the targeting options available to reach people sharing characteristics similar to your customer personas. Here are a few tips you can use if you’re just starting with display network activity.

Allow Audience Segmentation While Maintaining Reach

If one of your goals is to increase reach (putting your ad in front of as many people as possible), you shouldn’t include too many layers of targeting in one ad group. Instead, set up several ad groups to modify bids on every targeting combination to allow better reporting and bid modification without restricting your reach.

Leverage the Power of Similar Audience

Similar audiences enable you to expand the reach of your campaigns so that you can bring in new visitors to your website who have similar browsing habits as previous users or consumers. Make sure you segment similar audiences into discrete ad groups to monitor relative performance and modify bids accordingly.

Utilize Display Exclusions

Regularly assessing the placements where your advertisements are being served is vital to identify budget wastage. There are specific placements that always consume a large portion of your budget if you don’t manage them proactively. You can avoid a lot of this wastage simply by using display exclusion lists.

If you’re not using managed placements and haven’t reviewed where your ads have been showing up recently, chances are mobile games are wasting a substantial amount of your budget.

Try Responsive Display Ads

Responsive display ads are a substitute for manually creating creatives for each accessible ad slot. They require advertisers to add a variety of headlines, images, descriptions, and logos so that Google can show the best-performing combination.

Wrap Up

What is the reach of the Google Display Network, and how can you increase it? If you’re seeking ways to increase your brand’s reach, GDN ads are an effective way to get there.

However, you have to ensure that you serve your advertisement to customers who are likely to convert using GDN targeting. Also, it’s recommended to narrow down your users based on their interests and demographics.

When you take this targeted approach, you’ll have much more success, and can make your budget go further.