Google Display Workshop

Posted by: Rachel Mepham On Friday, March 30th, 2012 - Display Advertising

| Google

| Pay Per Click

| Search Engines

Google Display Advertising Workshop

I was invited to attend the Home & Garden Display Workshop on 28th March at Googles new offices on St Giles High Street.

The colourful building was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano and the new office interior is fantastic. Each room encompassed a new environment with different textures, seating, carpet and colours which created a very modern yet eclectic design.

The workshop consisted of attendees from both clients direct and agencies all focussed within the Home and Garden retail industries. The purpose of the event was to gather feedback from the participants on Google’s display network and build on this to inform us of the up and coming products and new functionality which could help us to enhance and improve the performance of our advertising on this particular platform.

Sales Attribution

The workshop kicked off with lunch which was nice and the opportunity to speak to some of the other attendees. Steve Fitton, Industry Manager –Media Solutions, then took us through the first presentation. He discussed the benefits of analysing the attribution of sales across all online activity via Google’s Multi-Channel Funnels. This is an important strategy we use for our clients to identify which platforms are influencing sales whether that be on a first, middle or last click. This type of analysis and the use of attribution modelling is becoming crucial to understand where and how to manage advertising budgets. Often brand keywords via search and direct traffic takes all the credit for the legwork which the non-brand terms and display advertising has actually created. This is just one of the tools that can be used to improve performance on the display network.

Contextual Targeting

He also discussed other areas of display including remarketing and similar users which everyone seemed to be seeing positive results from but the main subject to create some hostility was the contextual targeting. Many advertisers were finding their advertising appearing on sites which bared no relevance to which they had tried blocking and opting out of. The manual process to maintain this was taking its toll and many had thrown the towel in as they just were not seeing the results. It was explained that the display network should be reviewed separately to search but even when they weren’t compared the volume of sales were unable to justify the work or budget being invested. It was disappointing that Google didn’t really address this issue or go into any depth on best practice management or areas we could test to improve performance and therefore the issues raised were not really put to

bed in any way.

The Growth of Mobile

The second presentation (which should have been the first but was delayed) was from Peter Fitzgerald who gave us some obscure analogies, however presented very well and had everyone’s attention. He explained how important mobile was becoming and using an example of Kiddicare’s mobile landing pages demonstrated why separate mobile strategies must be targeted to mobile devices in order to generate ROI. He discussed some statistics on digital trends within the retail sector and then put a Q&A to the group to discuss.

Peter Giles, YouTube and Display Sale Manager then took the stand after a brief coffee break. He looked at some case studies and examples of how the display network has worked successfully for clients such as Groupon and ShoeDazzel, however for a UK workshop it would have been nice to see some UK company case studies!

One to One

The final session was by far the most useful and successful, one on ones with our Google contact, ours being Rick Jones, Industry Head for Retail. This allowed the opportunity for feedback on the session as well as a deep dive into our account to address any areas where we can improve, enhance or add some display strategies.

Overall the workshop had promise but I still feel I left wanting more detail and more insights over and above what I pretty much knew already. Hopefully the feedback given allows Google to take the next session to the next level.