If you’re here, you’re probably very familiar with DV360 already. But for those entering the wonderful world of programmatic advertising, let me do a brief introduction.
What is DV360?
Display & Video 360, previously known as DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM), is the demand side platform to run programmatic advertising within Google Marketing Platform portfolio.
DV360 vs Google Ads display campaigns?
What makes the difference, in my opinion, is the vast variety of targeting options DV360 provides, allowing for a wide range of data and audiences but also offering the key settings to narrow down to be able to maximise traffic quality.
The obvious difference between DV360 and Google Display Network is that with DV360 you don’t have to rely on GDN only, as in DV360 you also have access to non-operated Google inventory.
6 tips to improve your campaign CTR
After having done your audience research and uploading your creatives, it is time to start setting up your line items. We usually split the different audiences into different line items to have better visibility on audience performance separately if we are targeting a variety of audience groups.
As best practice, I recommend starting with as many of the default settings as possible, to have an overview of campaign performance at full reach and continue optimising against your own legacy data.
The settings we recommend updating from go live are:
1. Brand Safety Exclusions - As a general rule, it would be best practice to exclude all items under the “Sensitive Category” and review items under the “Digital Content Label” according to your client’s needs.
2. Environment - This setting will depend on whether you’d like to target inventory displayed in browsers, apps, or both. Consider your client’s audience and apply exclusions accordingly.
3. Frequency Cap – Discuss with your client what they would consider audience saturation, always selecting capping per day as it tends to give more control. Generally, we would recommend starting with 4 exposures per day for remarketing audiences and 2 per day for prospecting audiences.
After a month, we would recommend reviewing metrics (especially CTR) and evaluating the following settings:
1. Position – Consider updating this field if you’d like to have control over the position of your ad on the screen and within the content. We tend to unselect the “below the fold” position on the screen for CTR increase and monitor changes.
2. Viewability – DV360 allows targeting the inventory based on predicted viewability (how viewable an impression is likely to be). By default, this setting will target all impressions (greatest reach). We recommend updating this gradually, starting with 50% or greater and monitoring performance. By increasing this %, you will see a decrease in impressions, but hopefully an increase in engagement.
3. Apps & URLs – Probably the most important and revealing ongoing optimisation task you will conduct in DV360. Being able to exclude those Apps & URLs where you see low engagement, will make the difference in your campaign’s performance. You will need to go campaign level screen and select “Reports” on the left-hand side menu. Create a new instant report for the line item you’re analysing and select “app/URL” as the row and “Impressions”, “Clicks”, “CTR”, “Conversions” and “Cost” as the columns. Review the data and decide your list of Apps/URLs that should be excluded from your line item due to low engagement. We would recommend being a bit strict here and starting with those with a high number of impressions and 0 clicks, for example.
By following these tips, you will hopefully see an increase in your CTR, which means higher engagement with your ads.
Make sure you test these settings separately so you know what works best for your campaign!
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