Getting started

You can be up and running across hundreds of websites on the Google Display Network – in no time – with simple text ads or visually dynamic image and video ads.

Whether you're new to the Google Display Network or have tried it before, this step-by-step guide will help you set up successful campaigns.

To demonstrate, let's follow a savvy AdWords advertiser, Sarah, as she sets up campaigns for her online sports gear store.

Create a new campaign

Before launching a Display Network campaign, you'll need to think about three key factors:

What product or service do you want to promote?

Creating separate campaigns for different product lines helps you organize and manage your account, as well as track the success of your ads more accurately.

Sarah decides to focus on tennis equipment for her first Display Network campaign, instead of doing a broader campaign around all of her sports gear.

Where do you want your ads to appear?

You can elect to show your ads on both the Search and Display Networks or only the Display Network. Then, you can choose whether you want your ads automatically placed on partner pages related to your products within the Display Network, or specify target sites yourself.

Sarah chooses to create a new campaign for the Display Network only. Creating separate campaigns for Search and Display allows her to set different budgets for Search and Display campaigns and apply different campaign strategies for each one.

What are your bidding and budgeting preferences?

The bidding options enable you to focus on clicks (to drive traffic to your site), impressions (to optimize the visibility of your ad), or conversions (to specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition bid). You'll also want to set a maximum daily budget for your campaign.

Sarah chooses manual bidding for clicks as her bidding option. This lets her control her maximum cost-per-click bid at the ad group level or for individual keywords or placements.

How to do it

Here are the instructions you need to start advertising on the Google Display Network

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at adwords.google.com.
2. From the Campaigns tab, click the New Campaign button.
3. Do not check the Google search box. Within your campaign settings, scroll to the Networks, devices, and extensions section, click Let Me Choose under Networks, and make sure that the Display Network box is checked. If you want to limit this campaign to the Display Network.
4. If you want your ads placed automatically on partner pages related to your products, choose Relevant pages across the entire network. Or you can specify target sites yourself.
5. Select the bidding option you prefer, then set your campaign budget to a level you're comfortable with.
6. Click Save and continue. You can go back and change your settings at any time.

Create ad groups

Create your ads and ad groups

After you set up your new campaign for the Display Network, you're ready to create your ad groups.

Ad groups are comprised of ads and keywords. You'll want to identify specific products and create an ad group for each of them.

Within her tennis-gear campaign, Sarah sets up different ad groups for rackets, balls, and ball machines.

Ad groups help you reach different target audiences effectively since the AdWords system analyzes each group to determine which web pages are most relevant for those ads. As a general guideline, you might begin with an ad group for each of your best-selling products, with two or three ads in each group. By creating multiple ads, you'll be able to see which variations get the most response.

Sarah starts with three simple text ads per group. She writes compelling copy, telling readers exactly what she offers.

Later, you can create ad groups for your other products, using highly targeted messaging based on what you've learned from your initial ads. Google's optimized ad serving will automatically show the ads with higher click-through rates (CTRs) more often.

For this first round, Sarah creates ad groups for a few of her most popular items. Eventually, based on the information she receives, she'll create a group for every one of her products.

How to do it

1. In your AdWords account, go to the Campaigns tab and select the Display Network campaign that you just created.
2. Click the New Ad Group button, then type a name for this ad group.
3. Select the type of ad you want to create text, image, display, or mobile and follow the instructions.
4. Text ads are an easy, effective way to get started on the Display Network. However, you can advertise using a variety of ad formats on the Display Network, such as image, video, and rich media. And with our free Display Ad Builder, you can create your own display ads in minutes using your existing logos and product images.
5. When you re finished creating your ad group, click either Save and Continue to Billing or Set up Billing Later.
6. You can add a new ad group to a campaign at any time by returning to the Campaigns tab and clicking the New Ad Group button.

Target and bid

Choose targeting criteria and bids

The Google Display Network helps you reach potential customers across the web by automatically showing your ads to users as they're reading web content about your products and services. This is similar to Google Search, where ads are matched to users' search queries.

And similar to how it works with Google Search, your keywords determine where your ads are shown on the Display Network. Therefore, each ad group you create should have keywords that are related to one another but vary within the theme. The closer the relationship between each keyword and your product, the more likely it is your ad will find the right audience. We recommend 5 to 15 keywords per ad group. You can develop keyword lists yourself, or use the Contextual Targeting Tool, which will automatically do it for you.

Sarah decides to use the Contextual Targeting Tool to create her ad groups. Simply inputting "tennis rackets" into the tool automatically generates a variety of suggested ad groups, such as "tennis racket beginner", "tennis racket reviews" and many more that she couldn't have thought of herself! She can now look through this list of suggested ad groups and implement the ones she likes.

Now it's time to choose an appropriate maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid for each ad group. A good rule of thumb is to set the same bid amount you're using in your search campaigns. If you're using the Contextual Targeting Tool to create your ad groups, it will provide a suggested bid for each of your ad groups. A great benefit on the Display Network is that once you set your bids, Google's smart pricing feature will automatically adjust the price you pay based how likely your ads are to convert on a given web page in the Display Network, maximizing your return on investment (ROI).

Since Sarah is new to the Display Network, she chooses the same bid amount that she's using in her search campaigns. And because she's using Google's free Conversion Tracking to measure her campaign performance, she can later adjust her bids based on how they perform.

In addition to specifying keywords, you can choose from over 1,750 topics and sub-topics related to your business. This is ideal if you're looking to achieve even greater scale with contextual targeting, as it doesn't offer the same precision available with keywords, which you specify.

Further, if you'd like to hand-pick specific places to show your ads, you can select managed placements to show your ads on individual websites and pages in the Display Network. You can test this feature by manually selecting a few sites where you'd like your ads to appear. However, if your primary interest is direct response advertising, we recommend contextually targeting your ads using the automatic placements feature, which places your ads on contextually relevant sites based on your keywords.

How to do it

1. You can create new ad groups and keyword lists using the Contextual Targeting Tool, found under Tools on the Opportunities page. It automatically generates ad group, keyword, and bid suggestions based on your products and services.
2. Alternatively, you can manually specify your keywords by typing them into the keywords box on the Create Ad Group page. Or, you can upload a list of keywords from a spreadsheet. You will also see a list of suggested keywords based on a scan of the website linked to your ad.
3. Remember, you can add or edit keywords any time after you have created an ad group. Simply select that group and click the Add Keywords button.
4. When you are creating a new ad group, you can specify the keywords used to match your ads to Display Network pages by typing them into the keywords box on the Create Ad Group page. Alternatively, you can upload a list of keywords from a spreadsheet. You will also see a list of suggested keywords based on a scan of the website linked to your ad.
5. You can also add keywords after you have created an ad group. Simply select that group and click the Add Keywords button.
6. If you'd like to select topics or sub-topics related to your business in addition to, or instead of, the keywords you've specified, click Select.
7. To show your ads on specific hand-selected sites, click Select Managed Placements and add the URLs where you want your ads to appear.
8. Set your maximum cost per click (CPC) in the Ad Group Default Bids section of the Create Ad Group page. You can set different CPCs for your managed and automatic placements on the Google Display Network, and you can change them as often as you like.
9. Your ads are now ready to launch! In upcoming sections, you'll learn how to track and optimize your campaign.

Create display ads

Add display ads

Now that you've got your Display Network up and running, the next step towards improving your campaign is including display ads.

Start by creating ads for the products or services that you've focused on for your text ads. You can use the same keyword lists to automatically place your ads on relevant websites.

Sarah has lots of images of her tennis products, so she sets up display ad groups for all of the same categories she used in her text ads: rackets, balls, and ball machines.

You can create engaging, professional looking display ads for free using Google's Display Ad Builder tool. Click here to try the tool and create your own sample ad.

Here are some things to consider when designing your display ad:

• Change colors and fonts to match your brand.
• When creating text for the button on your display ad, use a call-to-action to prompt your audience.

Sarah chooses to write "Shop Now" on the button of her display ad. This motivates users to click the ad.

If you're using an image that has a white background, you should change your ad template to have a white background as well. This ensures a white box won't appear around the image and will make your ad look more professional.

How to do it

1. Click the Campaigns tab and select the campaign for which you want to create a new ad.
2. Create a new ad group for your display ads.
3. Under the Ads tab on the Ad Group page, select Display Ad Builder from the drop-down menu under New Ad. If you already have a display ad that you want to use in a Display Network campaign, you can upload it by selecting Image Ad from the Ad dropdown menu. Otherwise, select Display Ad Builder.
4. When the gallery of display ad templates appears, choose the one you'd like to use.
5. Customize the text and image on the template. For example, you can change the colors and fonts to match your brand. If you'd like, add images of your products and/or your company logo.
6. When you have finished designing the ad, click Save ad.

Measure performance

Measure your campaign's performance with Conversion Tracking

Whether your goal is to drive sales, collect leads or generate registrations, AdWords Conversion Tracking can help you measure the success of your campaign in reaching that goal.

Conversion Tracking is a free reporting tool available within your AdWords account that shows you the return you are getting from your campaign. By showing the effectiveness of each ad group, you can be smarter about where you spend your budget.

When Sarah sets up Conversion Tracking, she is able to see how many of the people who click on her ads subsequently watch a video demo of one of her rackets in use or orders one of her products.

Conversion Tracking helps you get the best results from your AdWords dollars. Conversion Optimizer, another free AdWords tool, can help you use the information you gather from Conversion Tracking to get more sales or leads at a lower cost.

Sarah uses the information from Conversion Tracking to determine which of her clicks don't lead to conversions, helping her meet her ROI goals.

You can gather additional information for your display ad groups by enabling View-through Conversion Tracking. This feature allows you to measure the number of online conversions by customers who saw but did not click on one of your display ads.

• Track conversions up to 30 days after a customer saw your ad.
• See which ads produced the most conversions, even if they didn't come from clicks.
• Combine click-through and view-through data to find the best places to advertise for maximum conversions.

Note: View-through conversions are reported only for display ads on the Google Display Network. They are not reported for Search Network campaigns or for text ads in Display Network campaigns. You must have Conversion Tracking enabled in order to use this feature.

How to do it

1. To start using Conversion Tracking, select Conversions from the drop-down menu under the Reporting tab.
2. Click New Conversion and follow the instructions.

Optimize your campaigns

Optimize your Display Network campaigns

Under the Networks tab, you can easily see a performance report for all of the Display Network sites on which your ads have appeared. Coupled with Conversion Tracking, you can quickly understand which sites are resulting in sales, leads or registrations and which aren't, and make decisions based on this information.

For example, you can use this information to:

• Monitor site-level performance for each of your ad groups, seeing which sites are meeting your performance goals. You can even view page-level performance within specific sites.

• Along with Conversion Tracking, this site-level data helps Sarah see which sites are and are not leading to sales.

• Increase bids on high-performing sites to maximize the delivery of your ads on those sites.
• Conversely, you can decrease your bids to improve performance on sites that aren't meeting your goals.
• You can exclude from your campaign specific sites and that aren't performing well. You can also use negative keywords to prevent your ads from being displayed on sites that aren't likely to work well for you.

• When Sarah notices that her ads are sometimes appearing on pages about tennis elbow, she excludes those sites and adds negative keywords such as elbow and tennis elbow to her campaign to prevent this from occurring in the future.

• If you see specific ad groups are performing well overall, you can expand on what's working by using the Contextual Targeting Tool to automatically create additional similar ad groups.

How to do it

1. Click the Campaigns tab, then select the campaign whose performance you want to optimize.
2. Click the Networks tab on the page for that campaign to view reports on your placements and bids.