Optimizing AdWords Display Campaigns for Website Engagement

Paid Media / October 27, 2016

Do you currently manage a campaign where the goal is website engagement? If yes, this article is for you. For everyone else, this will provide further insight into display campaign optimization tactics.

What are Engagement Campaigns?

Engagement campaigns typically focus on three key metrics:

• Pages/Session (how many pages are people visiting on average?)
• Bounce Rate (how many people leave after visiting 1 page; the landing page)
• Time on Site (how long someone stays on the website)

An example: Let’s say AdWords traffic averages 4 Pages/Session, a 30% Bounce Rate, and 3 minutes on site, we can generally conclude that people are engaged with the content of the website in that they’re reading content (the 3 minutes) on multiple pages (4 pages on average). The more you optimize for Pages/Session, the lower the Bounce Rate will be.

While these metrics are not the most important to an eCommerce website where the primary goal is sales and ROI, engagement metrics are extremely useful when trying to understand and optimize for a variety of other things like pre-empting a sale or other campaign types like informational campaigns (think: political or special interest groups, pharma…) and they’re also good things to optimize for when on a branding campaign and there isn’t a clear conversion goal (or there just isn’t one).

So let’s get down and dirty with optimizing AdWords display campaigns! (it now gets technical)

Display Campaigns

Optimizing engagement campaigns can be tough, especially when the media mix has display at its core. What makes optimizing display campaigns particularly difficult is that AdWords doesn’t show you: placement-level data on website engagement from Analytics. You can see that data at the keyword or ad-level and that makes optimizing for pages/session a lot easier but we’re left in a lurch when trying to understand if a particular placement (website) sends engaged traffic.

So what are we to do?

Luckily, Google Analytics can help us here! We can use GA to dig into which placements are driving unengaged traffic and then exclude them with the help of the AdWords Editor. Here’s how to do that:

First thing’s first: make sure AdWords & GA are linked. If they’re not, this won’t work. (sadface)

Step One

Open Google Analytics and navigate yourself through Acquisition > AdWords on the left side menu and select Display Targeting.

After that, select the Placements buttons

Step Two

Create a filter by click the Advanced button.

In this example, I’m looking to exclude all placements that had less than 1.3 Pages/Session. So I’m making the filter Include Pages/Session Less than 1.3.

Here’s what that looks like:

Step Three

After hitting Apply, you should see a curated list of placements. You may want to play around with your date range settings, making the date range longer for more placements.

These are the placements you want to exclude!

Step Four

After that, export your placements to a CSV and cleanup your data, making sure to keep the Automatic Placements, Campaign and Ad Group columns.

Step Five

Rename Automatic Placements to Website.

Step Six

Open AdWords Editor and download your account. After that’s done, I like to filter for just Display campaigns as seen here:

Step Seven

Navigate towards the Placements, Negative section found under Keywords and Targeting.

Step Eight

Now select the Make Multiple Changes button and paste the columns in the big white space. Make sure that the Destination option should be set to “My data includes columns for campaigns and/or ad groups.” Then hit Process!

Take a sip of coffee while the placements import!

Step Nine

At this point all placements (websites) should have been added as ad group-level negative placements! If there are any errors, take note of them, remove them and return to them later.

Now your can Post to your campaigns and make your changes live!

Step Ten

Give yourself a pat on the back, you’ve now successfully uploaded a whole bunch of junk placements to your campaigns and are probably already saving money!

Protips

I’m a big fan of automating repetitive workflows so here’s a protip: schedule these reports! In most cases, a monthly email should work but you may want to go as frequent as weekly or daily, depending on how big your spend is.

Just remember to change the advanced option to have the email reports active for 12 months (the maximum) and set yourself a reminder to resume these reports in a year from now. (I use Basecamp)

Mobile Apps

If you’re seeing a lot of Mobile App placements and want to exclude them, use this placement: adsenseformobileapps.com

Adsenseformobileapps.com will exclude all mobile placements moving forward!

Hope this helps!