When running campaigns on the Google Ads Display Network, doesn’t matter how large is your budget or what industry you are in there are some rules to follow. Here are the six top Google Display Network mistakes that you need to avoid:

1. Combining your display and search campaigns

Make sure you keep your display campaigns fully separate from your search campaigns. When creating a new campaign in Google Ads, it will automatically opt your search campaigns into the Display Network to help expand reach. Odds are you will see noticeably different conversions, conversion rates, CTRs, CPCs and CPAs on these two networks. People going to Google and searching specific things show a much deeper intent and capitalizing on deeper funnel users will need different strategies than expanding your reach to a new audience.

2. Including remarketing audiences in your awareness campaigns

With remarketing, you will likely want to be more aggressive with your sales message to encourage the user to perform a specific actions. This is exactly why you would segment out your audiences in separate campaigns. If you are creating ad groups in your remarketing campaigns targeting different user actions, you want to exclude these users from your new user campaigns and also try and add customer lists and audiences from certain conversion actions to try and keep these campaigns as segmented as possible. This will allow you a better controld over your budgets, landing pages and creatives.

3. Not using the proper exclusions

When creating your display campaign or updating your current campaign, you can set content exclusions. If you look at the middle column in the image, you can see the sensitive content options are selected but grayed out. This is because sensitive content options can be excluded at the account level if you prefer. That can save you a lot of money down the road.

4. Skimming your placement reports

Things we said above does not mean that you are free from checking your placement reports. Set up a consistent schedule to review where your ads are being shown if you are not using managed placement targeting. If you are a diligent PPC marketer who is always testing new targeting options, you may have to go back to the Placement reports more frequently to see how placement performance has changed since your last optimizations.

5. Getting complacent with targeting options

If you find basic targeting options within Google Ads that consistently work for your goals, you still can put in the effort to try and do better. Google gives advertisers creating custom intent audiences for display a list of recommended keywords you can choose to add to your audiences. When researching audiences to add to your ad groups, Google already compiled a list of auto-created custom intent audiences for you to test. Auto-created audiences can work very good if you are running out of new ideas. Even when you find certain targeting options that work for you, keep testing new audiences to reach your target customer, and custom audiences are an easy way to keep testing for display.

6. Leaving your columns in Google Ads alone

You can get plenty of direct conversions from your display campaigns if you find the right mix of targeting and engaging creative but some industries may not see direct conversions from their display campaigns and this usually happens when there are high priced items or very long sales cycles. Switch up your columns in Google Ads to see if users are eventually converting and two that are good to check are Cross-device conversions and View-through conversions. Your display ads could be having a much bigger impact than you realize.