The Google Display Network (GDN) is a marketplace between Google sites (excluding Google search), YouTube, and Google partner sites. Users of all these sites can be targeted when showing ads via the GDN. The following article is structured as follows:
Types of Ads
The following display ad types are eligible to show on the GDN:
Ad Block Sizes
There are standard formats, which are identical for display channels and GDN. Normally for mobile ads, and sometimes for video ads, the height and width are decreased. The available sizes are:
Leaderboard | (728×90) | Small rectangle | (180×150) |
Banner | (468×60) | Vertical banner | (120×240) |
Half banner | (234×60) | Small square | (200×200) |
Button | (125×125) | Square | (250×250) |
Skyscraper | (120×600) | Medium rectangle | (300×250) |
Wide Skyscraper | (160×600) | Large rectangle | (336×280) |
Image ads may contain static graphics or images, animated content, or flash-movies. Google allows a maximum length of 30 seconds for animations and a maximum file size of 50 kilobytes. Video ads have no maximum play time, but are recommended to be between 12 seconds and 3 minutes. The maximum file size is 1GB and can be provided in any video file format supported by YouTube, such as .MPEG4, .AVI, or .MOV. A static image of less than 50 kilobytes has to be shown after the ad is loaded. Instead of an automated start, these ads must be Click-to-Play ads. This means the user can see the ad only after they clicked on it.
Categorization of Websites
There are generally two types of websites: large and small.
It is important to understand what the features of a website are, who the audience is, etc. For example, consider big newspaper websites like The Times, The Mirror, and The Sun. What do they have in common? They deliver information on a daily basis, and their audience is almost everyone. To sum up, large websites have:
- Large readerships
- Well defined demographics
- Broad user interests
Imagine four people. Each of them have their own websites according to their specific interests: one about cats, one about dogs, one newspaper website, and one about cars. Limiting the websites to these specific interests, the market reach is decreased. So they are attracting users currently interested in the same subject, not more. To sum up, small websites can be characterized by:
- Specific user interest
- Attracting users at point of interest
Targeting
The following table introduces the different types of targeting methods that are available on GDN. Some of them allow you the usage of negatives in order to exclude specific triggering.
Positive |
Negative |
|
Contextual Targeting |
Book keywords to your campaigns to make sure your ads are just shown on websites with content related to these keywords | Use these keywords to keep websites out |
Placement Targeting |
Choose specific web-domains or subdomains, where your ads should be shown | Exclude these domains/ subdomains |
Topic Targeting |
Choose from a Google-predefined list of topics and sub-topics of websites to show ads on them | Exclude websites related to these topics |
Interest-based Targeting |
Based on the users interests and their surfing-history, ads will be shown to them if their interests matches your ads |
– |
Remarketing |
Choose just people to (re)target, who have already been on your website |
– |
All targeting methods may be used in all possible combinations to define clearly which people may see these ads.