Even though that currently Facebook is leading display ad revenue company, Google predicted to surpass it in the next few years and establish its status as the leading provider of all online advertising on the web, where it already dominates the search ads arena today.
To ensure that will actually happen, Google is taking some serious steps to improve its Display Network. The company has announced today on some major display ad-related improvements to AdWords (which operates the Display Network). Let’s go over the changes:
Display Network New Tab
While until now display ad campaigns run side by side next to search ad campaigns, from the next few weeks all display ads campaigns will receive a dedicated section under a new “Display Network” tab, where the interface of the tab is adjusted especially to manage display ad campaign.
What sections include in the new “Display Network” tab:
- Display keywords- All the keyword-level statistics for campaigns targeting search and display combined or campaigns targeting display only.
- Placements- Adjust the managed or automatic placements.
- Topics- Adjust campaigns topics.
- Interests & Remarketing- Adjust campaigns audience targeting.
- Exclusions- Section where advertisers can exclude specific targeting method.
Improved Contextual Engine
AdWords contextual engine is what actually analyze pages and “decides” which ads are the most suitable for a certain page. Google are stating that this engine has received its “biggest enhancement ever” and now it can offer “the reach of display with the precision of search”.
With the improved engine, advertisers can now adjust marketing campaigns based on keywords which can potentially be much more accurate than adjusting based on themed ad groups, as before. In other words, it now offers better precision and optimization of display campaigns.
Visual Targeting Diagram
The last new feature is pretty interesting. It is a visual diagram that shows the reach potential based on the influence of the different targeting options the advertiser has defined (keywords, placements, topics, interests or remarketing).
Overall, it does seems like Google Display Network has been upgraded. However, even with the best contextual targeting accuracy technology it still ignores one basic element that other companies like Facebook already progress into– The user itself.
Facebook has personal data about 850+ million users which can be used for personal ad targeting. At the moment, Google+ doesn’t even come near this number of users, not even mentioning its users questionable level of engagement.
Google already overcame the obstacle of integrating information across all of its products with its new privacy policy which allows Google+ to share information with AdWords. But if Google+ user-base won’t grow substantially while the users will be further engaged with social network contents, Facebook would still offer better personal ad targeting.
For more information about AdWords recent improvements, you can watch Google’s product management director for display Brad Bender discussing them on the following short video: