GDN Placement Optimization
Tired of wasting budget on spam? Detect and optimize display placements at scale.
Want to learn one of the most important keys to success in Google Display? Look no further than ads’ placement optimization. In addition, it seems that Google Display Network is also full of spammy websites. How can you drive quality traffic and increase conversions? The answer is simple. Block spammy ones and have quality placements on websites that provide great content and value.
SPOTTING GDN PLACEMENT CHALLENGES
- Ensuring the success of your campaign involves awareness of warning signs that could impact its performance. These indicators may signify underlying issues within your current placements, requiring proactive intervention and strategic adjustments. Identifying and addressing these warning signs early is crucial for campaign success, and saving ads budget.
Too-Good-to-Be-True CTRs
Watch for exceptionally high CTRs that may hint at inaccurate reporting or ineffective targeting. Evaluate whether the engagement aligns with your campaign goals. Remember, excessively high CTRs might indicate unintentional clicks, possibly linked to fraudulent or spammy behavior.
Low or No Conversion Rates
Watch for exceptionally high CTRs that may hint at inaccurate reporting or ineffective targeting. Evaluate whether the engagement aligns with your campaign goals. Remember, excessively high CTRs might indicate unintentional clicks, possibly linked to fraudulent or spammy behavior.
High Bounce Rates
Elevated bounce rates may indicate that users are landing on your page but leaving quickly. Assess the relevance and appeal of your landing pages to ensure a cohesive user experience. Additionally, be cautious of abnormally high bounce rates, as they could be indicative of spammy or fraudulent behavior rather than genuine user engagement.
AUTOMATED PLACEMENTS VS. MANAGED PLACEMENTS
Automated Placements in GDN
We recommend starting with automated placement right away. If you have some learning budget, this is a great way to get numbers for different placements. Spending a lot of time reviewing the placements is an important process. Don’t wait for bad ROIs and watch out for CTRs that are way above average. Check websites and block them if they share spammy pattern.
Managed Placements in GDN
Well-performing and quality websites are great managed placements for your campaigns. You’ll also find them within your automated placements and in your retargeting display campaigns. Managed placements should be the biggest part of your display traffic. However, it’s a long-running process. Avoid spending your budget on discovering good placements instead of bad ones.
HOW TO DETECT BAD DISPLAY PLACEMENTS AT SCALE
In theory, the process of running automated placements and separating them into good and bad ones, is a great head start. In reality, it’s a waste of time and money. Now, let’s talk about the challenges we’re facing.
Low sample sizes for many placements
Getting a stable conversion rate requires a stable number of clicks, typically in the hundreds. However, many placements on the Google Display Network (GDN) receive only a few impressions and clicks, rendering their conversion rates unstable. Unfortunately, this instability prevents actionable insights from being derived from these placements.
Avoid bad placements effortlessly
The GDN landscape may expose your ads to spammy placements, hindering your campaign’s success. While manual identification and removal of these placements are time-consuming, going for a customized automated approach is the more effective and efficient option for the removal of undesirable placements.
There aren’t only bad and good placements
Not all GDN placements are strictly “bad” or “good.” Avoid oversimplification in decision-making. A scalable solution involves categorizing placements by estimated traffic quality, enabling strategic budget allocation for higher-quality placements, enhancing decision-making in GDN campaigns.
- Furthermore, you may need some additional attributes you can derive from placements. It’s easy to create right away by applying some Excel functions. However, some cases may need a more customized solution using a scripting language like Python.
Group by top level domain
Let’s do a comparison between .com domains and other top-level domains to identify performance disparities. Unique top-level domains with seemingly impressive Click-Through-Rates (CTRs) may raise suspicions of being too good to be true, and those with poor conversion rates can be categorized as low-quality.
Does the name contain a number?
The simplest way is to compare two groups of placements, one with numbers in the domain name and the other without. Placements with numbers tend to have significantly higher CTRs. This phenomenon is attributed to some publishers having numerous (low-quality) placements, and adding numbers to a domain may result in a unique and available name.
How long is the domain name?
It is observed that longer domain names have higher CTRs. At some point, you might struggle to find a domain name for your website, especially when shorter names are challenging to find, also it contributes to improved performance in a manner similar to adding numbers.
- The three attributes above will improve your placement performance significantly. They are easy to build in Excel with some functions and pivot tables. Don’t be afraid of running actions based on your numbers. You can correct a wrong decision anytime by bucketing placements.
Lookup the IP Address of the placement
If you’re a publisher and managing hundreds of websites, you should consider the costs. You’ll find a lot of spammy placements that share the same IP address. Grouping your placements by IP address will give you some new insights.
Where is the placement located?
The top-level domain doesn’t tell you where the placements are located. With the IP address information, you can find the country where the server is located.
What is the hosting provider?
If you have a high-quality website, you’ll probably select a good hosting provider. On the other hand, when you have too many websites, you’ll probably select a cost-efficient host.
- When you spend most of your budget on display, you may want to get better results. For more tailored solutions, exploring custom options with Python programming allows you to enrich placement domains with additional information, offering substantial improvements.
Does the placement only run Adsense?
Most GDN placements can never pass the quality control of other display networks. It’s also a great perspective for analyzing the placements. Hence, AdSense-only websites will have a lot more fraud patterns.
How many ad slots are found on the website?
Some websites are full of ads all over the place. It’s nerve-wracking when you can’t click somewhere without clicking on an ad. Counting the ad slots per page is useful.
Is it a thin content website?
What is the total word count per placements? What is the ratio when you compare it to the number of unique words? Websites with keyword stuffing or thin content are more likely to be spam.
HOW TO EXTRACT HIGH QUALITY MANAGED PLACEMENTS FROM SERPS
Want to start with high-quality managed placements? We have a great suggestion for you. It works well if you know the most important keywords of your target group search.
Scrape SERPs for your keywords
Google has high standards of quality for organic searches. That is, any spammy placements never have a chance to rank.
Check domains for AdSense
Put emphasis on the ranking pages to get a share of the valuable traffic. Check whether AdSense is available. If possible, add it as a managed placement.
Hypertarget on page level
Using the full domain as a target will provide results, but there’s a more accurate way to optimize placements. Want better results? Then, consider the full URL as a target that ranks for your relevant keywords.
