Hey guys and gals, today I would like to talk about this:
Namely, what I’d like to talk about how we made $1.57M in revenue last 30 days at a 978% ROAS by taking a client that was already doing well on Facebook Ads, and building a Google Display Network (GDN) campaign for them.
Who’s the client?
I can’t say at this point as they haven’t yet agreed for me to publish their name. What I can say is that they are in the super-competitive niche of female beauty products.
When they first started talking to me they were already doing well with Facebook Ads. They’ve built an 8 figure Ecommerce company pretty much off of their founder’s knowledge of Facebook Ads.
What they didn’t have was a Google Ads expert and that’s what they came to Big Flare for.
What We Did
There’s a bunch of things we did, across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Bing, etc. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about today. The main point I want to get across is this: if you are already doing well on Facebook Ads, you should try Google Display Network!
I’ll give you a few pointers on what we did on GDN that helped us achieve the above result, but really the main thing to know is that the challenges on Facebook Ads and GDN are largely the same. In both cases, you are driving top-of-funnel, awareness traffic to a landing page and converting it to sales.
If you have already proved that it is possible for you to convert this type of traffic by building a successful Facebook Ads campaign, and seeing as Google Display Network has the same type of traffic, it stands to reason that there’s a good chance you can get GDN traffic to convert for you too.
What follows is a list of pointers to help you along your way, should you decide to embark on this journey…
Creatives
Use both standard banner ads, AND Google’s Responsive Display (RDA) ads. Banner ads, after a few rounds of optimisation, can perform better in terms of Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR). However, RDAs are super flexible and easy to create, and you only need to create one ad that will then fit in to every available placement in the GDN.
This means that RDAs will usually have the highest volume of clicks and conversions.
Don’t try and pick between the two, use both, so that you have the benefit of the scale of the RDAs, as well as the potential high performance of the banners.
In terms of your messaging, you’ve done the hard work of figuring out messaging that works for Facebook Ads. Use the same messaging in your GDN banners, but shorten it. You have MUCH LESS space for text in your banners.
Here’s a GDN creative brief template to help you create banners.
Landing Page
Here’s the other cool thing about porting over your campaign. If the landing page worked for cold FB ads traffic, it’ll probably work for GDN too. Most companies who do well on Facebook Ads have invested serious time and effort in to getting their LP’s right. And, guess what, now you can double up the return on that investment because those bad boys will work for GDN too!
So for your landing page, simply use your top performers from your FB ads campaign.
Targeting
Make heavy use of Custom Intent and In-Market audiences. When you start out, aim to have a few HUNDRED different audiences to target. The idea with GDN targeting is that you are throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. Every audience or keyword you add is an additional piece of spaghetti, an additional chance to find something that sticks.
To get more spaghetti, also try all the other targeting options:
Keywords
Affinity
Custom Affinity
Combined Audiences
Similar Audiences
Bidding
Use that automated bidding from Google. It’s great, especially for GDN. I usually will use just the “Maximise Conversions” strategy for GDN.
Start Big & Cull Aggressively
Be bold with your starting budgets. Spend a lot but as you start to spend, check the account and cull the poor performers aggressively and regularly (at least daily). Do not wait for statistical significance before culling something, just wait until it looks reasonable likely that this thing performs a bit worse than the average or target.
Things you can check and cull:
Placements
Creatives
Keywords
Audiences
Raise Budgets Steadily As Performance Goes Up
As you cull the losers, you should start seeing your ROAS go up. As this happens, simultaneously raise the budgets. But do not do this suddenly, as that will upset the algo that is managing the bids for you (assuming you have followed my advice to use Maximise Conversions. If using tCPA or tROAS, changing budgets does not upset your bids, and so you can do more sudden budget changes if you want).
Wrapping It Up
There’s a lot more that goes in to this but if you managed to figure out how to get FB ads to work, you’ll be able to fill in the gaps above.
There are other ways of getting GDN to work and what we have above is my way of doing it. The main message here is that if you can get Facebook Ads cold traffic to work, you might also be able to get GDN to work as well. And, there just might be a gold mine there for you, so give it a go!