When most people think of running AdWords campaigns, they immediately think of ads running on Google.com. Many don’t realize that you can target audiences outside of Google.com with both text ads and display advertising. The ads will run across Google’s Display Network, which includes any website running Google Ads. Note, this also includes Google properties like Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, etc. It can be extremely powerful when set up and managed correctly.

Although there are several different ways to target audiences across the Display Network, setting up targeted themes is often a strong way to go. That’s where you set up ad groups targeting a tight set of keywords, which Google can use to understand the content you want your ads to match up with. For example, if you want your ads to show up on hdtv review sites, you would create an ad group that includes a tight set of keywords around the topic “hdtv reviews”.

That’s great, but how do you estimate the cost per click (CPC) and budget for Display Network campaigns? Is it even possible to gauge CPC’s for various themes you are targeting? Yes, you can do this, and I’m going to show you how to do it today. I’ve created a five minute video below that walks you through how to use the contextual targeting tool in AdWords to find estimated CPC’s by theme. Check out the video below to learn more.

Video Transcription:
Hello, everybody. This is Glenn Gabe from G-Squared Interactive. I just wanted to take you through a quick video tutorial today. What I’m actually going to go through is the contextual targeting tool and how to estimate CPCs and budget based on the themes that you set up. For those of you that aren’t familiar, the Display Network enables you to target an audience outside of Google.com. It could be extremely powerful, but you do need to understand what a rough CPC and what the rough budget will be. That’s what we’re going to go through today.

There are various ways to target an audience across the Google Display Network, but the way that we’re going to work through today is by targeting themes, very tight themes that Google will interpret and then provide your ads against targeted content. It’s contextual advertising.

In order to get started, what you’re going to do is log in to your AdWords account. You’ll probably be under your Campaigns tab. What I want you to do is actually go to Tools and Analysis, it’s a tab up top, click the dropdown, and then click Contextual Targeting Tool. That will take you to this screen right here.

The first thing we’re going to do is actually map out some themes for a specific category. So it’s that time of year. It’s the holidays. A lot of people are buying electronics and TVs. So let’s use HDTVs as a test for us. What I want you to do is go up into the search box and actually type “HDTV” and then hit Search. What Google is presenting now are themes based on HDTVs. You have about five or six different suggested ad groups with about five to seven different keywords in there. Again, very tight themes.

What this is going to tell Google, if you choose a specific “suggested ad group”, which you won’t for every one, I mean, some of these are not going to be targeted, like “HDTV antenna” probably isn’t one that you’re going to run, but for the ones that you’re going to run, you’re telling Google to present your ads against content that is relevant to the specific themes. And that could be very, very powerful if used properly.

What’s worth noting here is that if you go to the far right, you’ll see Suggested Bid based on the ad groups that are suggested here. Suggested Bid is based on historically competitive bids on the sites that are relevant to the keywords you entered. So Google is taking a look at what bids were on sites that matched these themes and giving you an estimated CPC.

Moving back to the left here, you’ll see two icons for each of these suggested ad groups. One is a plus symbol, another is an ellipsis. If they’re grayed out, you cannot drill into them. If they are active, you obviously can. The ellipsis represents predicted placements. These are websites that Google is saying that your ads can show up on based on the themes that you’ve set up. If you click the ellipsis, you are actually going to see all of those websites, and more importantly, you are going to see an estimated CPC like we saw before. So this is a bid suggestion, which you can use to estimate clicks, costs, obviously clicks times estimated CPC. You can start to back out conversion numbers. It’s just a great place to start based on the themes that you’re creating.

So that’s predicted placements. Let’s pop back to the results here. We clicked the ellipsis before. Now what I’m going to do is click the plus sign. Again, it needs to be active. If it’s grayed out, you cannot drill into it. Let’s go into HDTV deals. If we click the plus icon, what you’re actually going to see are more themes based on HDTV deals. So now you’re going deeper into the themes, sub-themes within HDTV deals. This is something that you definitely would want to do if you’re researching this for a specific project.

Back to our CPCs for a minute. If you go to the right here, you’ll actually see again suggested bid. Again, this is based on each of the historical bids that Google has found for each of the themes that you’ve created. Of course, like we did before, you could actually click the ellipsis icon to drill into predicted placements. You could click the plus sign to expand links to the websites so you could actually check those out. Again, you do have bid suggestions up top for estimating your CPC. This is the way that you would drill into specific themes, figure out estimated CPCs, and then start to gauge what your rough budget would look like.

This concludes the tutorial. I hope you feel more comfortable using the Contextual Targeting tool to estimate CPCs and budget. Again, it’s a great way to actually map this out and export it directly to your campaigns. So head over to my blog at GSQi.com, post a comment, ask questions. That’s totally fine, and you could email me directly from the blog as well. Good luck with the Google Display Network and happy bidding.

Last year I wrote a tutorial explaining how to set up remarketing in Google AdWords, which ended up being one of the most popular posts on my blog. I’ve received many emails from marketers who used the tutorial to successfully launch their own campaigns, which can be a confusing process if you are new to remarketing. That’s awesome, but one common question I received from readers was how to use custom combinations to ensure you present remarketing ads to the right people. For example, if someone converted on your site, you probably wouldn’t want to present a remarketing ad to them asking them to come back to the site to place an order. That can be an embarrassing situation.

In order to accomplish this type of targeting, you would need to use a custom combination, which would tell Google to present ads to a specific audience, but NOT for people who already converted. You can think of it as a conditional (Include Audience A, but not Audience B). By the number of requests I was receiving, it was easy to see that people were confused by the topic.

Well, the readers of my blog have spoken, and I’ve been listening. I’m happy to announce that the tutorial below explains how to use custom combinations to achieve your remarketing goals (less the embarrassment of presenting ads to people who already converted). Note, “conversion” can mean a lot of things, including an ecommerce transaction, filling out a form, downloading a pdf, or even visiting a specific page on your website. Conversion is determined by your specific business and website and should be determined while building a strong analytics strategy.

Revisiting My First Remarketing Tutorial
The tutorial below is for marketers already familiar with setting up basic remarketing campaigns. If you are new to remarketing, I highly recommend you walk through my first remarketing tutorial to gain a solid understanding of the setup. Once you learn how to set up a basic remarketing campaign, you can revisit this post and learn how to use custom combinations for advanced targeting across the display network, while if you want to market your services online, there are services that help promote your business such as therankway that help a lot in this area.

A Quick Overview of the Sample Remarketing Campaign We’ll Be Using
I’ll walk through an example below of a common remarketing campaign that would benefit from using custom combinations. For this example, imagine we run an ecommerce site selling sports equipment. We want to use remarketing to present ads to people that visited a section of our site, but didn’t convert. Those ads will show up across the Google Display Network to visitors who viewed pages from that section of our ecommerce site selling sporting goods.

For this example, our “audience” will be visitors to our football gear section of the website. This means we’ll need to place remarketing tags on any page within the football section. But again, we don’t want to present remarketing ads to visitors that actually converted (and purchased something). So, we’ll need to make sure we know when certain people converted by creating a second “audience”. We’ll need to add that second remarketing tag to our thank you page, which is presented after a customer completes a transaction. Then we can set up an ad group within our remarketing campaign that uses a custom combination to present ads to only non-converting football visitors.

Step by Step, How to Set Up Custom Combinations
Without further ado, let’s dig in and set up a custom combination, based on the scenario I listed above. Again, I’m not going to cover the initial steps of setting up a remarketing campaign in detail, since that was covered in my first tutorial. Instead, I’m simply going to focus on the process for setting up a custom combination in the AdWords interface.

1. Set Up Your Remarketing Campaign and Ad Group
Go to your remarketing campaign (set up during my previous tutorial), and add a new ad group called “Football Gear”. This ad group will contain ads for people that we know visited our football gear pages, but never converted. If you haven’t gone through my previous tutorial, you’ll need to set up a new remarketing campaign and then create this ad group. You can review my previous tutorial to learn how to do this. Remember, this ad group will not contain any keywords, since we will only be presenting ads to the “audience” we are targeting. You can set up a basic text ad when creating the ad group, since we’ll revisit ad strategy for remarketing campaigns later in this tutorial.

2. Create Your First Audience
Set up your first audience (visitors to our football gear pages). Access the “Football Gear” ad group you just created and then click the “Audiences” tab. Then click the “Add Audiences” button. Note, if you don’t see the audience tab in AdWords, you should review my previous post to learn how to find it.

3. Create Your Remarketing List
Click “Remarketing Lists”, and then “Create and Manage Lists”, which is located below.

4. Enter The Details For Your Remarketing List
Now click the “New Audience” button and fill out the details for your football gear audience. Note, you should choose “Remarketing List” from the dropdown menu. You can name the new audience “Football Gear Visitors” for this example. You can review my previous tutorial to learn more about this process and the fields you need to fill out at this stage.

5. Access Your Remarketing Snippet
Once you create your audience, you will need to access the tag that AdWords generates, and include that in all pages within your football category (on your website). You can find the snippet of code by clicking the link under “Tags/Rules” for the audience you just created. You can place the tag before the closing body tag in your football category pages. Note, this snippet needs to be added to ALL pages in your football category (if you want to target any visitor to those pages).

6. Create Your Second Audience
Now use the same process we just went through to set up a second audience for visitors that converted. When you need to get the remarketing tag (the snippet of code), make sure you choose “https” in the dropdown, if the conversion page will be rendered via https. For example, if you are collecting credit card information, then it will probably be https. You can add this snippet to the thank you page before the closing body tag. Note, if you are unclear about using https or http, just check out the URL as you go through the process on your website. If there’s an https in the beginning of the URL, then choose https as your selection.

7. Create a Custom Combination
OK, now you have two audiences set up that will become part of your custom combination. Click the “Audiences” tab, and then the “Custom Combinations” link. At the bottom of that window, click “New Custom Combination”. Give your combination a name and description. For our example, let’s use “Football Gear Less Converted”.

8. Adding Audiences To Your Custom Combination
In order to create a custom combination, you will need to create a conditional using the dropdown menus in AdWords. First, select “all audiences” from the first dropdown titled, “Users included or interested in…” When you use the second dropdown for “Select audiences”, you’ll need to select “Remarketing Lists” to view the two lists you created. The default view will show you “Interest Categories” and not your remarketing lists. Now add your football audience by clicking the “add” link next to the remarketing list. Click the “OK” button below to proceed.

9. Exclude An Audience
Now click “Add Another” to add a second condition. Choose “none of these audiences”, since we want to exclude visitors that converted. Now use the “select audiences” dropdown to select the “converted” audience. Again, you’ll need to choose “Remarketing Lists” once you use the dropdown, since “Interest Categories” will be the default view. Add your “converted” audience by clicking the “add” link. Click the “OK” button to proceed.

10. Save Your Work
Click “Save and Continue” to complete the process of creating your new custom combination. Last, click “Save” at the bottom of the window, and you should be good to go.

11. Create Your Remarketing Ad
OK, you’re almost there. Your custom combination is set up, which is awesome, but your ad group doesn’t contain a targeted ad yet! At this point, you’ll need to create ads that will be presented to people that visited your football gear pages, but never converted. Note, you can include both text and display advertising in your remarketing campaigns (and I highly recommend doing so).

When creating your ads for this ad group, make sure you have a solid strategy for your remarketing efforts. For example, I mentioned in my initial remarketing tutorial how easy it is to creep people out with very aggressive remarketing ads. Just because you know they were on your site doesn’t mean you should mention that in your ad. :)

Presenting special offers, discounts, etc. is smart to do, while you should refrain from “We know you like our football section, come back now!” For our purposes, let’s include a 20% off special offer to get those visitors back to your site. We know they were checking out your products already, so maybe the special can nudge them to come back and buy. Also, you can drive these visitors to a specific landing page customized for this audience. You can provide tailored content, knowing they already visited your website (and that they’ll be receiving a 20% discount).

Congratulations! You have set up a custom combination in Google AdWords, and you are ready to remarket to a targeted audience!

Summary – Advanced Remarketing With Custom Combinations
Remarketing in AdWords can be extremely powerful when set up correctly. My hope is that between the two remarketing tutorials I’ve provided here on my blog, you can be up and running relatively quickly. As you can see by going through this tutorial, you can come up with some interesting targeting scenarios using custom combinations. Once you get comfortable with setting up a basic remarketing campaign using custom combinations, you can easily expand to more advanced tactics.

Happy Remarketing!

GG