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Display campaigns let you reach a relevant audience with visually engaging ads as they browse millions of websites, apps, and Google-owned properties (such as YouTube) to achieve your marketing objectives. |
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A Display campaign is one campaign type available to you in Google Ads. |
Benefits
- Reach relevant people in multiple places: Display campaigns can reach people worldwide across millions of websites and apps, and on Google-owned properties. This allows you to expand your reach and stay top of mind with an audience beyond just Google Search.
- Build campaigns around your goals: Drive sales, leads, and website traffic or build awareness and consideration for your business, product, or service.
- Designed for ease of use: Display campaigns use advanced solutions powered by Google AI across targeting, bidding, and formats to reach a new or existing audience. This can help your campaign deliver the best campaign results, friction-free. Google AI powers most Display features, such as Smart Bidding, optimized targeting, and responsive display ads.
Instructions
1. Create a new Display campaign
You'll begin by creating a new campaign in your Google Ads account and selecting a goal for your campaign. The goal that you select should align with what you want to achieve with your campaign. For example, if you want to encourage people to visit your website, select Website traffic when you create the campaign.
Create a new campaign and set a goal
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
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- Click the Campaigns dropdown.
- Click Campaigns.
- Select the plus button
, then select New campaign.
- Choose Sales, Leads, Website traffic, or Brand awareness and reach.
- If you don’t have a goal in mind, you can also select Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance.
- Select Display as the campaign type.
- Select Standard display campaign as the campaign subtype.
- Provide the URL for your business’ website.
- Enter a name for your campaign.
- Select Continue.
2. Select your campaign settings
Your campaign settings allow you to choose the locations and languages where you want your ads to appear. You can also select how often your ads appear to the same customer, opt out of showing your ads on content that doesn’t fit your brand, set start and end dates for your campaign, and more.
Choose locations and languages
- Select the geographic locations where your ads will appear or places you’d like to exclude. Learn more about location targeting.
- Exclusions can be helpful if you’re targeting a larger area and want to avoid a location within it. For example, you may want to target all of the United States, except a certain state or city.
- Enter the languages you’d like to target. The ads that you create should match the languages that you choose to target. Learn more about language targeting.
Additional campaign settings
Ad rotation: Show ads that are expected to get more clicks or conversions. You can choose to optimize rotation for your best ads (recommended for most campaigns) or rotate ads indefinitely. For some campaign types, you can also choose to optimize for conversions or rotate evenly.
Ad schedule: To limit when your ads can run, set an ad schedule. Keep in mind that your ads will only run during these times.
Devices: Device targeting lets you choose the types of devices where your ad can appear. You can show ads on all devices or target specific devices (for example, you could choose to show your ads on mobile devices only).
Campaign URL options: If you use a third-party click tracker or have developed sophisticated proprietary click tracking capabilities, you can add a custom tracking template. A tracking template lets you put additional information in the URL to identify the source of an individual ad click.
Content exclusions: Opt out of showing your ads on content that doesn't fit your brand. You can choose based on digital content labels, sensitive content, or content types.
Dynamic ads: Add a product feed to your campaign so that you can show personalized content based on what people have viewed on your website or app.
Start and end dates: If you want your campaign to start or end on a future date, you can set a start and/or end date respectively.
Conversions: This setting controls which conversion actions are reported in the "Conversions" column for this campaign. If you use Smart Bidding, your bid strategies will optimize for these conversions.
3. Set your budget and bidding strategy
Your budget influences how often your ads show and how prominently they’re featured. Your bidding strategy determines the way your budget is spent. Display campaigns support automated and Smart Bidding strategies that can manage your bids for you and can help you meet performance goals.
Choose a budget and bidding strategy
- Enter your daily budget. This amount is the average you want to spend each day.
- The most you'll pay per month is your daily budget times 30.4 (the average number of days in a month). Some days you might spend more or less than your daily budget. Learn more charges and your average daily budget.
- Choose your bidding strategy. Display campaigns will automatically suggest a bidding strategy for you based on your campaign goal. If you don’t want to use a suggested bidding strategy, you can select a bidding strategy manually:
- Smart Bidding strategies: Target CPA, Maximize conversions
- Automated bid strategies: Maximize clicks, Viewable CPM
- Manual bid strategies: Manual CPC
Read our Smart Bidding guide
4. Choose your targeting strategy
Display campaigns offer multiple ways for you to reach people. You can:
- Let Google Ads find the best performing audience segments for you with optimized targeting.
- Add additional criteria like audience segments or keywords (also known as "targeting signals") to optimized targeting to find similar criteria to serve your ads on.
- Or, turn off optimized targeting and choose targeting signals that make the most sense for your campaign.
Set up targeting
If you don’t want to add any targeting signals, select Next to continue building your campaign.
To add targeting signals:
- Select Add targeting.
- Select your targeting signals.
- (Optional) To turn off optimized targeting, add targeting signals first, expand the Optimized targeting section, and then deselect the checkbox next to "Use optimized targeting".
- Select Next.
Which targeting option is right for me?
- You want to reach and acquire new, relevant customers while meeting your goals: Keep optimized targeting enabled. You don't need to add targeting signals.
- You want to reach and acquire new, relevant customers, and you have specific audience segments that you want to reach: Add targeting signals to the campaign and keep optimized targeting enabled.
- You don't want to look for new customers: Turn off optimized targeting and use your current data segments.
Learn more about optimized targeting
5. Create responsive display ads
Display campaigns support responsive display ads. With responsive display ads, you can upload your assets (images, headlines, logos, videos, and descriptions), and Google AI will generate ad combinations for websites, apps, YouTube, and Gmail.
To improve the effectiveness of your ads, consider uploading:
- 5 or more images
- 2 or more logos
- 5 headlines
- 5 descriptions
- A video
If you want to have more control over the creatives for your Display campaigns, you can also build and upload your own image ads.
When you finish, select Add to ad group. You can then choose to add a new responsive display ad to the same campaign, or choose Next to finalize your campaign.
Learn more about creating responsive display ads
6. Review your campaign
On the “Review” page, you’ll have the opportunity to review all of your setting selections.
Here, you can address potential issues described in alert notifications. To do this, click Fix it in the notification.
If you receive a notification about an issue preventing campaign publishing, you won’t be able to publish your campaign until that issue is resolved.
If you’re ready to publish, select Publish campaign.
What’s next
After you’ve finished setting up your campaign, it may take a few days for your ads to start showing. Ads are typically approved within one business day. Reporting for Display campaigns may take up to 72 hours to appear in your Google Ads account
It may take some time for your bidding strategy to fully optimize performance. If you can't find the results you’re looking for in the first 14 days of your campaign, consider increasing your bid or updating your bidding strategy to Maximize conversions. You should also make sure there’s enough budget to support your campaign.
Use Performance Planner after your campaign has been live for at least a week. Performance Planner looks at historical data for your campaign and then provides actionable recommendations for future campaigns. You can access available headroom, simulate different bid and budget scenarios, forecast conversions, maximize growth, evaluate seasonality, and increase the efficiency of your campaign. Even better, you can use Performance Planner to examine multiple Display campaigns at the same time.
