216: Google Display Network – How To Run Profitable Ads With Ilana Wechsler

Podcast: Download (Duration: 57:41 — 66.3MB)

The Google Display Network strategy that works starts with remarketing, then uses the placement data that campaign generates to find the sites your customers visit after they leave you. Ilana Wechsler runs Green Arrow Digital and specializes in the Display Network, which is the channel I have personally never made profitable outside of dynamic retargeting.

The Display Network reaches over 2 million websites, a larger footprint than Facebook, and almost nobody in ecommerce circles talks about it. Ilana was a data analyst in funds management for ten years before building AdSense sites, watching an algorithm update destroy them overnight, and then flipping to the buying side of Google.

This episode walks through her actual sequence: remarketing first, then direct placement campaigns built from remarketing data, then in-market audiences layered with keywords, plus the negative placements that block bot traffic and the analytics trick that filters bounced visitors out of your remarketing lists.

A naming note: this conversation predates Google renaming AdWords to Google Ads and folding Display Network campaigns into the current campaign types. The targeting concepts, in-market audiences, placement targeting, and remarketing lists for search ads all still exist under those names.

Key takeaways

• Start with remarketing, excluding people who already purchased. It is the lowest hanging fruit on the Display Network.
• Mine your remarketing placement report to see which sites your visitors go to next, then target those sites directly for all their traffic.
• In-market audiences track short-term behavior over the past couple of weeks and are Ilana’s best performing targeting. There are over 500 categories.
• Affinity audiences track long-term interests and have performed worst in her testing.
• Layer two targeting types together, such as an in-market audience plus a keyword, to constrain where Google places your ads.
• Test 10 to 12 wildly different creatives in one ad size (300×250) before producing the other sizes.
• Add adsenseformobileapps.com as a negative placement to stop wasting budget on accidental in-app clicks.
• Build remarketing audiences in Google Analytics so you can exclude visitors who bounced in under 10 seconds.

What is the Google Display Network and how is it different from Facebook?

The Google Display Network places banner and text ads across more than 2 million publisher websites, which makes it substantially larger than Facebook. Both are interruption marketing: someone is reading an article and your ad appears alongside it.

The network splits into two broad targeting approaches. Contextual targeting shows ads based on what the page is about, and behavioral targeting shows ads based on who the person is.

Facebook’s interest targeting is genuinely better, and Ilana does not dispute that. Facebook has first-party data because users tell it about themselves directly, while Google infers behavior from Chrome, Android, and Gmail signals.

Facebook also has the share button and far more ad copy above the image. The Display Network’s advantages are scale, much cheaper clicks, and diversification away from a single ad platform.

Does the Google Display Network work for every business?

Almost every niche can work on the Display Network, with a local general store being the obvious exception. Success hinges far more on your offer than on your industry.

That is the piece Ilana sees people get wrong most often. A banner has to stop someone reading a New York Times article, which requires an offer compelling enough to interrupt them.

Where should you start with the Google Display Network?

Start with a remarketing campaign that excludes anyone who already purchased. These are people who have already visited your site, which makes them the cheapest conversions available.

That campaign then becomes a research tool. Google reports the specific URLs where your banners appeared, which paints a picture of where your past visitors go after leaving you.

Ilana’s home improvement client illustrates the payoff. Their remarketing placement report showed banners appearing on home decor magazines and publications, which made sense for people planning a renovation.

The next move is to target those sites directly for all their traffic, not just your remarketing pool. That becomes a separate placement campaign running alongside remarketing.

How do you structure Google Display Network campaigns?

Keep each targeting method in its own campaign so you can evaluate and kill parts independently. Remarketing is one campaign, direct placements is a second, and behavioral targeting is a third.

Set every display campaign to display network only. The default setting combines Search with Display Select, which makes it impossible to analyze display performance on its own.

Granular structure is what gives you the ability to act. When one in-market audience underperforms, you want to switch off that specific piece without disturbing anything that works.

Within the placement campaign, give each URL its own ad group. That way you see how each site performs on its own.

What are in-market audiences and why do they outperform affinity audiences?

In-market audiences target people based on what they have browsed in the last couple of weeks, which captures active purchase intent. Affinity audiences target long-term interests, which is much weaker signal.

Ilana’s example for my linens business is the in-market category for bridal wear. Someone browsing wedding dresses right now is a live prospect in a way that someone who generally likes weddings is not.

There are over 500 in-market categories, and Google builds them from Chrome browsing, Gmail, and Android signals. Her home improvement client used in-market categories for roofing services and home improvement.

Affinity is her least favorite. She has tested it extensively across clients and it consistently underperforms in-market targeting.

How do you layer targeting to control where your Display ads appear?

Combine two targeting methods so Google only serves where both conditions are met, which Ilana describes as overlapping two circles of a Venn diagram. The combination steers Google far more tightly than either method alone.

The practical pairings are an in-market audience plus a keyword, or a placement plus a keyword. For my store that means the bridal wear in-market audience combined with a broad keyword like weddings or handkerchiefs.

Keywords on their own are where things go wrong. Unlayered keyword targeting is exactly what produced the runaway junk placements and app traffic that made me abandon the Display Network years ago.

Big domains need the same treatment. Targeting the New York Times or eBay as a whole is meaningless, and overlaying a keyword confines you to the relevant sections.

How do you target competitor listings on eBay with display ads?

Place ads on eBay itself, layered with the keyword for your product, so you only appear on the listing pages where people search for that item. Ilana discovered this opportunity from a remarketing placement report showing that a client’s visitors were going to eBay next.

That campaign linked the banner directly to the product page rather than to an offer. It is one of the few non-remarketing cases where sending display traffic straight to a product worked well.

The logic is that intent is already established. The person searched for the item, they are on the category page for it, and the banner offers the same thing.

How do you test creative on the Display Network?

Test 10 to 12 wildly different designs in a single ad size before producing the rest. Building all nine ad sizes upfront costs a fortune in graphic design before you know what works.

Use 300×250, the medium rectangle, as your test format since it is the most commonly accepted size. Once you have the winning creative or top two, roll those out across the other sizes.

Wildly different means genuinely different concepts and offers. Testing a green button against a red button is not what this stage is for.

Run text ads alongside image ads, because publishers control which ad formats they accept. Some sites allow only text and some allow only banners, so running both means you are eligible for more inventory.

What offers work on the Google Display Network?

Top of funnel offers work best, and the fastest starting point is whatever already converts on Facebook. My store runs a free-plus-shipping handkerchief offer, and Ilana’s advice was to run exactly that on display.

Her client examples follow the same pattern. A free PDF guide for the home improvement client, and a free video course for another.

That second client had a sequence worth copying. After the four-day video course ran its email sequence, they built a remarketing campaign offering a $1 three-day membership trial, excluded people who had already registered, and delayed the campaign by four days so it landed after the course ended.

Skip pure brand awareness campaigns. You only pay per click rather than per impression, so you get free branding regardless, and the ad should still ask for a response.

What click-through rate should you expect on the Display Network?

Around 1% is a good Display Network click-through rate, far below the 5% to 10% typical on Search, because there is no search intent behind the impression. Ilana does not optimize to click-through rate at all.

Conversion rate is the metric she manages by. Specifically, cost per lead on display compared against cost per lead on search.

Display should come in materially cheaper than search. Once your cost per lead falls under your acceptable threshold, that campaign can run indefinitely.

How much should you bid on Google Display Network campaigns?

Start with manual bidding at $1 and check whether you get impressions. If impressions are not appearing, raise it slightly, and once leads start coming in you can usually drop it.

Automated bidding needs volume before it works. Roughly 50 conversions per month is the threshold for lead generation campaigns, and shopping campaigns need considerably more.

Give a campaign about a week before judging it. If there is no traction, fix the offer and creative first, since a weak offer will look identical to a targeting problem.

What negative placements should you add to Display campaigns?

Add adsenseformobileapps.com to block your ads from appearing inside mobile apps entirely. In-app placements generate accidental clicks from people, often children, tapping the wrong part of the screen.

The second category is junk content sites. Green Arrow maintains a standard negative placement list of low-quality domains, including many .info and .xyz sites, that generate impressions and clicks with essentially no conversions.

Those sites exist to earn AdSense revenue rather than to serve readers, and a meaningful share of their traffic is bots. Google catches much of this, and adding your own blocklist is a cheap extra layer.

Starting with remarketing sidesteps the problem entirely. Your existing visitors are real people, so junk placements never enter the picture.

How do you build better remarketing lists in Google Analytics?

Build your remarketing audiences in Google Analytics rather than in the ads interface, so you can filter by any behavior Analytics tracks. The single most valuable filter is excluding visitors who spent under 10 seconds on your site.

Those people almost certainly clicked by accident or bounced immediately, and paying to reach them again is waste. Filtering them out concentrates budget on people who actually engaged.

Analytics audiences cover all your site traffic, not just paid traffic, which is a common misconception. You can build an audience of everyone who arrived from Facebook via UTM parameters, then show those people a banner matching the Facebook offer they already saw.

Analytics also shows you which in-market and affinity categories your existing visitors fall into. Those are the exact categories available as Display targeting options.

What is RLSA and how does it make search ads cheaper?

RLSA stands for Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, and it lets you bid on broad search terms only for people who have already visited your site. Search clicks are expensive precisely because intent is high, and RLSA limits that expense to people you have already reached.

The mechanic is straightforward. Someone visits your site without buying, and later searches something broad like “napkins,” and you can choose to show only that person an ad.

This flips the usual funnel economics. Build the remarketing list cheaply through display or Facebook content promotion, then pay premium search prices only for warm prospects.

It also unlocks keywords you could never bid on profitably otherwise. Broad top-of-funnel terms become viable when the audience is restricted to people who have already engaged with you.

Why the Display Network is how you scale past search

Search hits a hard ceiling because you cannot make more people search for your product. Ilana describes the recurring client conversation: search works, budget increases, it keeps working, and eventually you have bought all the profitable search traffic that exists.

Display is the next layer. It creates demand rather than capturing it, which is why it scales beyond what search can deliver.

Display traffic is also more stable than Facebook. Ilana’s observation is that Facebook ads die unpredictably for no discernible reason, and Display Network traffic stays consistent.

How often you rotate creative depends on audience size. Small remarketing lists need frequent rotation because the same person sees the banner repeatedly, and large audiences need it far less.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Google Display Network bigger than Facebook?

Yes. The Display Network spans over 2 million websites, giving it broader reach than Facebook, though Facebook has better interest targeting because users supply that data directly.

Where should you start with Google Display ads?

Start with a remarketing campaign excluding past purchasers. It converts best and its placement report tells you which sites to target next.

What is a good click-through rate on the Display Network?

About 1%. Search delivers 5% to 10% because of purchase intent, and display click-through rate matters less since you should optimize to cost per lead instead.

What are in-market audiences in Google Ads?

In-market audiences target people based on browsing behavior over the past couple of weeks, indicating active purchase intent. There are over 500 categories and they consistently outperform affinity audiences.

How do you stop Google display ads showing on junk sites?

Add adsenseformobileapps.com and a list of low-quality domains as negative placements, and layer keyword targeting on top of any broad placement so you are not eligible everywhere.

How many banner sizes should you create?

Start with just 300×250 and test 10 to 12 different concepts in it. Produce the remaining sizes only for your winning creative.

Can you exclude bounced visitors from remarketing?

Yes, by building the audience in Google Analytics rather than in the ads interface. Filter out anyone who spent under 10 seconds on your site.

What is RLSA in Google Ads?

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads restricts your search ads to people who have already visited your website. It makes broad, expensive keywords affordable because you only pay for warm prospects.