Display Network advertising as everyone around believes is the best way to boost brand image and get some instant visitors to your website. So, as luck would have it, one fine morning I decided to go for display network advertising to get some exposure for my beloved fitness blog, which has of late, started gaining some traction. My friends were excited to see the outcome and so was I. So, I started off with the simplest form of display network advertising yah, text ad. So, it seems like another success story that I am going to spin round here. But my friend, this is not the case. Here I am going to unfold how some small mistakes cost me huge loss financially. Let’s proceed:
First Thing First: Like all SEO guys out there, I am a bit over smart. I do thing that does not need to be done at all, but in order to show off my importance I have to do that. So, when I was trying to launch my first Display advertising campaign for fitness blog, I decided that I must create a landing page for that, which is all very good. But then a horrible idea crossed my mind. I thought it was a good idea to block the landing page from search engines since this will create an issue of duplicate content. Initially it seemed a good idea but I was not aware of the fact that I should not block the Google-ads bot from that page too and placed the below tag in the robots.txt file unknowingly:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /ppc/my-weight-loss-landing-page.html
Now, it turned out to be a big disaster. My ad never gets approved and so, I did some research and found out that I should not have blocked that page from Google-ads bot. So once again I changed the robots.txt file and placed the below code so that Google ad bot could crawl the page which is a must thing to do:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /ppc/my-weight-loss-landing-page.html
User-agent: AdsBot-Google
Allow: /ppc/my-weight-loss-landing-page.html
Auto tagging
Finally, it helped me got through the approval process. But lol, when I checked it in Google Analytics, a rude shock was waiting for me there. Hell, I was unable to get detailed information on paid traffic. To cut the long story short, I had made a blunder, I forgot to make the auto tagging enabled so there were two options, either I had to do that thing manually or else I had to enable auto-tagging. So I chose the auto tagging option and waited a few days to have enough data to crunch them.
Demographic Targetting
But again sky seemed falling apart when I saw that the visitors were least interest in the ads and in fact none of them was sticking around or checking other pages. So, I started digging the details and finally found the most embarrassing fact that I targeted the wrong demography. As I was promoting fitness and weight loss products for men, there was no such reason as to why I should not narrow down my audience. Finally realization dawned on me that most of the visitors that I got via Adwords were female folk and it prompted me to spring into action and make necessary changes in the Demographics section of Google Display advertising network.
Above the Fold targetting
But as soon as I fixed the problem of demography, I saw a drastic fall in the number of visitors. In fact, my ads were not drawing any more visitors. So, it prompted me to go for the newly inducted feature in display advertising – Above the fold advertising. Yah, it helped me a lot to get some traffic and at last, my site got some real queries. But still there was a huge gap between the number of queries and the cost of Adwords. So, it was a kind of compulsion that I should do something to tap the opportunities. So, I decided to try my fate on Remarketing.
Remarketing
I came up with great and compelling ad copy but the problem remained the same. There was hardly any change in the number of conversions. So, again I decided to pinpoint the problem. The result is undoubtedly amazing. People seemed disinterested just because I was targeting those people who had left in the checkout process and that means, they were not happy with the pricing or other things. I learnt it the hard way that I should have targeted home page or made necessary changes in the ad copy to see a difference. Means, I should have come up with a discount or similar offer for disgruntled audience that did not convert for one reason or the other.
Michael Evans has been writing for YouLoveCoupons.com that contains Weight watchers promotion code, Bistro MD coupons and other discount coupons code.
