Blog 572 - 4 

Concept 1 – Google Display Network (GDN Reserve) 

The first concept from this week that I would like to mention is GDN Reserve. Google Display Network Reserve means advertisers can guarantee impressions across brand-safe sites on the Google Display Network. It is a form of placement targeting that gives you: guaranteed impressions, at a fixed CPM price, and against pre-screened brand-safe inventory. GDN Reserve offers three main benefits:

• Not Auction – Based - Reserve offers you space on the GDN without having to concern yourself with the vagueness in pricing inherent in an auction/real time biding model.

• Augmentation - Guaranteed impressions on relevant content during product launches or YouTube homepage buys to extend the effectiveness of the campaign.

• Guarantee - Spend and volume is guaranteed, so fixed budgets, leftover budgets, and limited time offers are acted against quickly and effectively. 

GDN Reserve offers eleven categories; entertainment channel, sports channel, news channel, tech channel, women’s interest channel, men’s PG channel, local channel, education channel, B2B channel, Hispanic channel, health channel and custom channel. For example, you are trying to promote a tennis ball; in GDN Reserve you would select sports channel sites as your category to show your advertisement. Google Display Network Reserve works well if you want to achieve significant awareness of your brand in a set time period. Because it offers guaranteed ad impressions at scale, and only places ads on brand-safe websites, advertisers often use Google Display Network Reserve when they're launching new products, promoting a limited time offer, or running a holiday or event-specific promotion.

Illustration of 11 categories (Source: GOMC Digital Marketing Course)

      

Concept 2 – Topic targeting

Topic targeting allows ads to be eligible to appear on any pages on the Google Display Network that have content related to your selected topics. Just like your business caters to certain customers, your customers may be interested in certain topics. Topic targeting lets you place your AdWords ads on website pages about those topics, whether it's agriculture, music, or something else entirely. You can use topic targeting in combination with individual placements -- which are pages or sites you've chosen where you'd like your ad to show and keyword targeting which lets you choose the keywords that should trigger your ad to show. For example, by targeting the "Women accessories" topic, for instance, you enable your ad to appear on any Google Display Network website or other placement that includes content about handbags, jewelry, scarfs etc. You can also select more precise subtopics, such as pendants, pearls, purses or clutches. This can be extremely helpful because there are many potential customers out there that are interested in a variety of different automobiles. 

Isn’t Topic Targeting quite similar to GDN Reserve? Both have categories?

                         Illustration of topics (Source: GOMC Digital Marketing Course)

Skill Set

As we have a team presentation this week on display advertising I have learned a lot about GDN Reserve. According to my understanding, this is the safest way to advertise on Google AdWords. It is a guaranteed way of getting impression across brand-safe sites on the Google Display Network. Furthermore, you get to place your ads in most relevant categories. For example, if I’m trying to sell women’s shoes, I would place my ad in “women’s interest categories” to get most impressions.  

Reflection

This week’s reading was the most confusing to me. There was so much to read and it was very complex, especially the article “An Empirical Analysis of Search Engine Advertising: Sponsored Search in Electronic Markets” by Ghose and Yang 2009, was extremely hard and I didn’t understand anything and in the end lost interest in it. I’m not sure how I’m going to perform on this week’s quiz. Other than that, I’m looking forward to registering for the campaign and get our ad running on search engine. For next week, I hope to learn more about tweaking our ad according to the feedback generated from click through rates.