A Brief History of Paid Advertising

Paid advertising has long been a staple when it comes to getting your business out in front of people and really exemplifying just what it is your business can offer people. Whether this paid advertising is in print media, on the radio, or (in the last few decades), on websites and in applications connected to the Google Display Network.

In recent years, we’ve seen a dip in the performance of print and radio advertisements, with newspaper advertising seeing a drop of more than 70% since 2006. If anything, this should drive us to utilize the more modern Google Advertising Networks for more productive use of our advertising budgets.

But where do you even start with Google Advertising? Firstly, we should talk about what this ad network is, and what it offers to you as a business owner.

The Google Advertising Network

The Google Advertising Network is split into two major sections, both with their benefits and downfalls in relation to advertising. The Search Network is comprised of Google Search Results pages, other Google services such as Maps or Shopping, and search sites that partner with Google to display ads.

The Display Network, which is the other major part of the Google Ads Network, is comprised of other Google-based sites like YouTube, Blogger, and Gmail, as well as the thousands of partnered websites that apply to host advertisements along with their content.

By default, new ad campaigns created through Google Ads are set up to show across the entire network to give ads the most possible visibility, but also to allow you to precisely choose the users you target with your advertising.

Google Display Network and Display Advertisements

Display advertising is arguably one of the best forms of advertising available through Google. A display ad is comprised of a set of images, headlines, descriptions, and landing pages. Each of these ads is dynamically created by Google based on the assets provided, allowing each ad to actually be comprised of several different combinations of image and text.

So why display ads over search ads? Well, first, display ads operate on a push approach, meaning they are displayed to people who might be interested in your product or service, with the goal being to push users to your website after viewing a video, email, or browsing the web for related concepts.

Display ads, in turn, are used to generate new leads, rather than solidify current leads. Furthermore, display ads appear more regularly in the apps and on websites that we visit every day—further driving new traffic from all corners of the internet. In short, display ads are best for building awareness of your brand, products, and/or services.

Why Google Display Ads?

So, we’ve established that display advertisements are for building awareness, but why would you choose them over search advertising? The answer to that is probably not what you’re expecting: you wouldn’t choose display ads over search ads, you’d use them in tandem.

Think about it this way: if you offer an emergency service or anything that is remotely time-bound, search ads are the key for your business. If someone is having a plumbing emergency, they will be searching for plumbers, not browsing other websites hoping they stumble across an advertisement for the service they’re in desperate need of.

For that same example, however, a display ad would create brand awareness and keep your services top-of-mind for when these things DO happen. They also help to quantify and categorize your core services, so people know who to call when the need for those services. Whereas display ads are part of the awareness stage of a client’s journey, search ads are for the interest stage.

Working with both is crucial, as many of your clients are acquired during the awareness stage, whether that be through advertising, social media relationship building, or even word-of-mouth advertising. The client’s journey is one that converts from awareness to interest and finally to a customer, and everyone’s journey needs to start at awareness in some capacity.

Take Armor as an example here: without capturing some clients at the awareness stage, and making them more familiar with our brand, they’re just as likely to take their electronic devices to Best Buy, GameStop, or any of the other large businesses they’re already aware of, even if the service is worse or more expensive.

The fact of the matter is that making people aware of your brand and business is the first step to creating new and repeat customers, and the Google Display Network can benefit you greatly in this respect. It allows you to show off your brand, your services, and your tone all in one place, and doesn’t interrupt the user’s normal web browsing.

Setting Up Google Display Ads

Display Ads are relatively easy to spin up and maintain, with a lot of the standard Google Ads guidelines being applicable. You’ll start by generating a square logo, as well as at least 3 additional images of these qualifying sizes. You’ll then need a minimum of 3 headlines of 30 characters, 1 long headline of 90 characters, as well as a minimum of 3 descriptions of 90 characters. You also have the ability to provide up to 5 video-based assets to replace the images for your advertising.

As a quick side note, we’ve seen that video marketing performs better than traditional image or print marketing, so if you have the ability to put videos into your advertisements, that’s the optimal path to take for most industries.

These pieces of information should exemplify your business, brand, products, and/or services. They should create awareness for your brand and what it can offer over your competitors, what your brand stands for, and where your brand operates.

Putting these pieces of information together, you’ll arrive at several advertisements that look something like these.

As you can see there are a TON of different styles these ads come in, and Google will automatically generate these based on the site they’re being placed on and the assets you’ve provided in the previous step.

Remarketing With Google Display Ads

Many marketers will argue that display advertising has one main goal, and that’s is remarketing. But what is remarketing, and how to utilize ads to remarket for us?

Remarketing is the act of marketing your product to someone who is already aware of it, to help to push them from the awareness stage to the interest stage of the buyer’s journey. One of the best ways to do this is built into Google Ads using cookies.

You can install a piece of HTML/JavaScript on your website through Google ads (and they give you the option to copy-and-paste this, so don’t get discouraged) that will create a cookie on a visitor’s computer when they visit your site. This cookie is a piece of information stored on their web browser that denotes that they’ve become aware of your website, brand, business, products, and/or services.

This cookie will be maintained in their browser as they navigate to other websites, and Google is able to read this and serve your ads back to this user since they have already visited your site. It’s a win-win, because if they’ve already visited your site, they’re aware of your brand, Google is now simply trying to show them the information you’ve outlined to convert them into someone who is interested, and eventually a qualified paying customer.

Knowing this, it’s important to make sure the information you’re providing when building display ads is relevant and promotes the awareness of your brand, business, products and services, and is targeting the correct demographic of users that you would like to turn into customers.

In summary, the idea of remarketing is simply to increase awareness after your brand has already landed in front of someone, to convince them that your business is the one for the job by exemplifying your brand or business.

Wrap Up

Display advertising is an important tool in the sales funnel for any business. Coupled with your search advertising, these ads can create more leads and potential clients simply by making your brand and services aware to your potential customers at the awareness step of their journey.

Putting together display ads takes some time upfront, to prepare the assets and content and to tweak to ensure they’re working for you. This time spent is invaluable as it allows your advertising to work for you, especially if you go to placing the code on your site and letting remarketing work for you.

ARMOR’s Marketing department is a Google Partner and has years of experience working with the Google Advertising Network and can provide you with quality display ads for remarketing and more, depending on what matches your brand’s timeline. Stop in today to discuss starting your advertising journey with Google, and producing more qualified leads with it.