Google provides a number of tools to help you research, plan, launch and measure your ad campaign. When planning any campaign, it’s vital to know your audience and where they are online (for more on this, here’s a handy post). You do not need to advertise on all platforms that Google provides – choose the one that will give you the most engagement and drive sales – read on to find how you can choose the best platform and ad format to increase your revenue.
Tip: All mobile activity is huge at the moment and will continue to grow massively over the next 12 months (currently 75% of mobile video ads happen in-app) so make mobile advertising a priority when planning a campaign.
Planning Tools
First and foremost, you need to have the following locked down before you kick your ad campaign off:
Target Audience: Specific interests, demographics and device usage, from this research you can make a better decision as to what platform you will use to place your ad.
Budget: With correct planning and execution, you’re less likely to go over budget. Use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner to get some budget estimates.
Databoard for Research Insights
Do your research! Google conducted many studies on all kinds of ad formats, they even let you make cool infograhpics with the data. Check our one out below, if you need to pitch the value of advertising to your supervisor, use this tool!
You need to find out how your target audience is interacting online and most importantly one what device. This tool can give you that insight.
The Display Benchmark Tool
The Display Benchmark Tool is key for benchmarking your ad views and clicks, below we’ve selected video format and measured completion rate as an example benchmark.
You can also measure advertising trends based on formats using the ‘Trends’ tool. More importantly, you can filter the data by verticals, which will further contribute to your audience research.
Give it a try next time you’re planning a campaign, or want to switch up a current one.
The Customer Journey to Online Purchase
This is a marketer’s dream, you can see where different channels impact customer journeys. Once you find your target audience and where their buying decisions can be better influenced, tailor your campaign to this criteria and watch the sales roll in.
The Full Value of Mobile Calculator
Mobile marketing is massive and will only continue to grow, the mobile calculator tool gives you the opportunity to upload your AdWords data or manually input the data, to measure how many of your sales started on mobile devices.
Brand Impressions
What to see how you’re doing? Check out the brand impression tool – it will give you details on what visuals are making an impact, topics your brand has been mentioned with and actions details, e.g. Google+ comments and shares and YouTube activity.
Discover Mobile Planet
With this you can dive into mobile advertising data and make your own charts, like the one below. Great for some research presentation data and of course device research!
Remember: Videos are everywhere – including mobile – check out this useful infographic for more on mobile video advertising.
