Today, innovations in targeting, optimization, and measurement can help you achieve greater performance with your Display Network campaigns. We’re investing heavily in these areas, and we’re pleased to announce several tools that give you better measurement, transparency and value for your display advertising campaigns.
Better measurement
1. Relative CTR: User behavior on web pages varies depending on the type of page users are on. For example, users may interact with ads on a product review page differently than with ads on a blog. Clickthrough rate (CTR) tells you how often users click on your ads, but CTR can’t tell you how your ads perform compared to other ads on the same page.
To better gauge the performance of your Display Network campaigns, Relative CTR shows you how your ads perform relative to other ads running in the same places on the GDN, letting you benchmark your performance across the Display Network. For example, if your display ads have a CTR of 0.04%, while other ads in the same places on the GDN have a CTR of 0.02%, your Relative CTR is (0.04)/(0.02) = 2x.
The screenshot below shows how Relative CTR looks in AdWords:
Why does Relative CTR matter?
At first glance, a CTR of 0.04% may seem low. But knowing that this is two times the CTR of competing ads tells you that your ads are actually performing, on a CTR basis, better than ads on the same page. This means that your ad creative matches the websites your ads are appearing on and that your audience is responding to your message.
Alternatively, you may see that your Relative CTR is 0.5x, meaning that your ads are only getting half of the average clickthrough rate. This means that your ads may not be resonating with the users you’d like to reach and that you may be able to improve performance by refining your ad creatives.
To view relative CTR within your AdWords account, go to the "Ad groups" tab, select "Customize columns" from the "Columns" drop-down menu, and select "Relative CTR.” Relative CTR will appear at the campaign or ad group level.
2. Impression Share (IS): With the auction model, multiple advertisers compete for the same ad spots on a web page. To help measure your online presence, we’ve created
impression share, which represents the percentage of times that your ads were shown out of the total available impressions for which your ads were eligible to appear on the GDN. In other words,
impression share provides you with your online share of voice.
Based on IS data, you can increase your share of voice by adjusting your budget or improving your
Ad Rank. The
Lost IS (budget) metric tells you how many impressions you're losing due to your budget, while
Lost IS (rank) tells you how many impressions you’re losing due to Ad Rank.
For example, you may see that you're losing 25% of impression share due to budget restrictions and must increase this campaign’s daily budget to get more impressions. Or you might see that you're losing 35% of impression share due to Ad Rank and may need to raise bids or improve your creatives.
Greater transparency
With your ads running across millions of sites on the GDN, it can be difficult to keep track of where your ads are and aren’t running. The
Content Ads Diagnostic Tool (CADT) tells you why your ads aren’t showing on the Display Network. For example, you may see that your placement-targeted ad groups are not running because they lost the auction:
You can also see when your ad is running, and on what specific placements:
We'll start releasing CADT to a small number of advertisers in mid-June and will launch a full release in early July.
Better value for your online display dollars
Users often need to scroll to see your ads on a webpage. When a user does
not scroll far enough to view your ad, these unseen impressions hurt your advertising effectiveness and result in wasted spend. We recently launched a feature called the
Unseen Impression Filter that ensures that CPM advertisers are not charged for impressions that users have a low probability of viewing.
For example, say that a user lands on a publisher site where your ad serves below the fold:
You'll only be charged when we predict that a user will actually scroll to see your ad:
Note that this feature is automatically enabled and does not require any controls or set-up.
Wrapping up
All four of these tools and features --
Relative CTR,
Impression Share,
Content Ads Diagnostic Tool, and Unseen Impression Filter
1 -- are available in all AdWords languages. For more information, please visit our
Help Center.
Posted by Dan Friedman,
Inside AdWords crew
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