No Impressions on GDN with placement targeting - help me please

read some threads here, searched google, checked a book...

[GabGoldenberg]

hey guys,

I'm running some campaigns on the GDN and barely getting impressions. I'd love your help figuring out why.

I started with $20 a day as my budget, and 0.50 max cpc.

Each adgroup is for a single placement. The placements are news sites focused on a particular part of the world/topic. GDN estimated that they have between 10,000s to millions of impressions/week, so it's not that I'm targeting tiny sites.

Geo-wise, I'm targeting three cities in three countries that have sizable populations interested in this news topic/region.

My ads (to get started faster) were text ads. On the first few dozen impressions I was getting 1.0 avg rank, now it seems around 1.8 avg.

The first thing I tried was duplicating my campaigns and removing the age targeting I'd used initially. The new campaigns didn't get that many more impressions.

After a day or two of that I added a 300x250 image ad to each adgroup, thinking perhaps that was the reason I wasn't getting impressions. Logging in this morning it appears that hasn't done anything for my impressions.

I've now doubled budget and bids on all the campaigns and adgroups.

I'm really mystified, especially as I thought that my initial bids were pretty decent for the gdn.

Anyone able to help me figure this out? I've tried also looking at the display lost impression share column, but for now it's just blank...

How do I diagnose the problem? Do I just keep playing guess-and-check until the impressions unlock? Add more banners in other popular sizes (728x90, 120x600, 160x600, 250x250 ...)? Is it perhaps an account quality score thing? I need to get a lot of impressions quickly, because I'm split testing names for a company and I can't move on without having solved this question of the optimal name. I don't want to drag this out and delay the rest of the launch...

Thanks for listening and helping!

[aristotle]

Did you look through the pages of the targeted placement websites to see what types (text or image) and image sizes are getting the impressions on those sites now? In other words, browse through those websites (in incognito mode) and look at the types and sizes of ads that get the lion's share of the impressions now.

[GabGoldenberg]

I did do that. My understanding was that my text ad would just replace an image ad... I'll look at adding image banners.

On that note, my budget and bid increases today helped, at least on the campaigns where I removed the age requirements.

What's interesting (puzzling?) is that a few of my placements offer exactly 0 impressions across all campaigns. Could that just be a bid thing (since they're the most popular news sites in teh bunch)? Or budget? Does one have more effect than the other?

[earlpearl]

You may want to try the google opt out geo method: ie instead of just targeting the cities, target much larger geo areas around the cities, and then opt out of the outlying areas. There was a great study on this a year ago and some follow up studies.

Take a city in the US in the middle of the country...say St Louis. Instead of targeting just St...target say a radius of 80 miles around St. Louis...and then opt out of most of the areas outside of the city.

That seems to enable you to get seen by tons tons more searchers than just starting in St Louis and targeting only that city.

[GabGoldenberg]

Good idea Earl.. saw the other thread on this and have tried it already ... hasn't unblocked my impressions.

[aristotle]

hasn't unblocked my impressions

Maybe you're not getting many impressions simply because your bids aren't high enough. That seems like the most obvious explanation.

Does Adwords provide any information or guidance about how high you need to bid in any particular case?

[GabGoldenberg]

That's possible... I'll need to try that out, as well, but would like to put that off given my budget. For now I'm going to try Earl's tip on other campaigns that are partially unblocked and see if that helps there. Also, i'm going to look at animated banners as they apparently have a higher ctr on average, so may induce G's algo to allocate me more impressions.

[GabGoldenberg]

Little update: I looked at impressions broken down by location and saw that most were coming from a single location. So I dropped the other locations and added the country where I was getting most of my impressions. Why the country? Because the geo targeting here for desktops is a big lie: IPs are just based on where an ISP is registered. You could be 200 km away from where the IP indicates. So I'm relying on language and my placement targeting to help keep the targeting somewhat decent.

Besides that, I doubled budget, and added some 728x90 banners to the mix. We'll see what happens.

[GabGoldenberg]

Also, the 300x250 hardly got impressions cuz they were in age limited campaigns; have added them to the non-age limited campaigns and will watch results.

[instand1]

Each adgroup is for a single placement.

This is what would give us as customers of Google transperant insight and more control over our budget. Even though Google gives us the tools it does not mean that Google favours it.

In search campaigns I noticed that some broad match keywords have a better quality score than exact match or +qualified keywords, not justified by a higher CTR.

So google encourages a bit of waste of our budget.

My guess is that this is true for placements as well: Too narrowly targeted adgroups may not be displayed at all.

[GabGoldenberg]

Instand - I hear what you're saying, but the reality is that my other adgroups also target a single placement and are getting impressions.