Display Ads on Apps Nobody Meant to Target

Where the clicks came from

A local business runs a display campaign in AdWords: picture ads shown on other sites to people interested in home improvement.

The monthly figures look healthy. Thousands of clicks, a low cost per click, and a click-through rate well above what the search ads manage.

Nobody has phoned about the ads, and the contact form has been quiet.

The placements report explains it. Much of the money went to mobile games, a flashlight app and a solitaire app, none of which anybody chose.

How a display campaign ends up in apps

The Display Network includes websites, YouTube and a very large number of mobile apps that carry Google's ads.

Targeting by interest, topic or demographic decides who sees an ad, not where. Unless placements are excluded, an ad aimed at homeowners can appear wherever a homeowner happens to be, including a game on the couch.

App inventory is plentiful and cheap, and automated bidding tends to buy what is cheap. A campaign set up to get clicks drifts towards wherever clicks cost least.

Search campaigns can carry display ads too. The setting that adds the Display Network to a search campaign is easy to miss when the campaign is created, and many owners never knew it was on.

Signs the budget is in apps

• A display click-through rate higher than your search ads earn.
• Visits lasting a second or two in Analytics from display clicks.
• App names in the placements report unrelated to your business.
• Phones and tablets making up nearly all display clicks.
• Thousands of clicks and no enquiries traced to the campaign.

The second is the one Analytics shows plainly. Someone who meant to tap the game lands on your page, and their first act is the back button.

Why the taps are accidental

Games place ads where fingers already are: beside the controls, along the bottom of the screen, or full screen between levels with a small close button.

A tap meant to continue the game, or to close the ad, becomes a click. On a shared family phone, the person tapping may well be a child.

AdWords filters some invalid clicks automatically and does not charge for them. A real tap by a real person on a real phone usually counts, whatever its intention.

The advertiser pays for each one, and the clicks look like interest in every report that counts clicks.

Checking where your ads appeared

In each display campaign, the placements report lists every site and app where the ads appeared, with impressions, clicks and cost.

Sort it by cost. Apps appear alongside websites, usually under their store names, and in many accounts they fill the top of the list.

Widen the date range too, since the pattern shows more clearly over months than over a week.

For search campaigns, check the networks setting. If the Display Network is ticked and nobody meant it to be, that is where some of the search budget has gone.

Excluding apps and app categories

AdWords lets you exclude individual apps and whole categories of apps, such as games, from a display campaign.

Excluding the categories you never meant to reach does more than chasing apps one at a time, since new ones appear in the report every week.

A placement exclusion list in the shared library can be applied to every campaign, so a new campaign does not start from scratch.

Lowering bids on mobile devices is a blunter tool. It cuts app placements, but it also cuts phone visitors on ordinary websites, who may be exactly the people you want.

A worked example

A home staging company, which furnishes and styles houses for sale, started a display campaign aimed at people interested in real estate.

The account showed plenty of clicks at a price that looked like a bargain, and a click-through rate the owner was pleased with. Nobody who called or booked a consultation mentioned seeing an ad.

The placements report showed most of the spend in games, puzzle apps and phone utilities. Analytics showed those visits lasting about a second.

The mechanism was simple. The audience was right in principle, home sellers, but nothing stopped the ads following them into apps where almost every tap was a slip.

The fix was to exclude the app categories nobody had chosen, build an exclusion list for every campaign, untick the Display Network in the search campaign, and track the contact form and phone calls as conversions.

Display now runs on a smaller budget, on chosen sites, and is judged each month by enquiries rather than clicks.

Judging display by enquiries

Clicks and click-through rates measure attention, and accidental attention measures nothing.

Set up conversion tracking for what you actually want: a contact form sent, a call from the website, a booking. Then compare display's cost per enquiry with search's.

Treat view-through conversions with care. AdWords counts them in a separate column when someone saw an ad, did not click, and enquired later, which does happen and is also easy to overrate.

Display often costs more per enquiry than search, because it reaches people who were not looking for you at that moment. That can be acceptable, as long as the figure is known.

What display is good for

Used deliberately, display has real uses for a local business.

Remarketing reaches past visitors to your site, keeping a considered purchase in mind during the weeks of deciding. Your privacy policy has to mention it.

Chosen placements, such as local news sites or sites about your trade, put the ad in front of readers rather than players.

Both are narrower and cost more per click than the open network, and both are far easier to judge.

The counter-case

Some businesses do reach customers in apps. A business selling something young people buy on impulse, or an app itself, may find app placements worthwhile.

Excluding every app also cuts some legitimate placements, such as news apps where readers behave much as they do on the news site.

So exclude by category and by evidence, not by principle, and keep any app placement that brings enquiries at a cost you accept.

For most local businesses that means excluding games and utilities, checking placements monthly, and judging display only by enquiries.

This week

1. Open the placements report for each display campaign.
2. Sort placements by cost and read the top.
3. Exclude app categories you never chose.
4. Build a shared exclusion list for all campaigns.
5. Untick the Display Network in search campaigns.
6. Track forms and calls as conversions.
7. Judge display by cost per enquiry, monthly.

Step six is what gives the other steps a point. Without conversion tracking, a campaign full of accidental clicks and a campaign that brings customers look the same in the report.

How AdWords judges the search side of the same account is covered in quality score without the mystery.

Frequently asked questions

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