3 prospecting features for Google Display campaigns

Google discussed three features aimed at helping advertisers reach new customers with Display campaigns in a blog post Tuesday. Here’s what you need to know.

Dynamic prospecting with product feeds. Google announced this feature recently, and you may be familiar with the concept if you run them on Facebook. As opposed to showing product ads based on what visitors viewed on your site, dynamic prospect ads show products based on people’s past interactions on Google and publisher sites in Google’s network. Google says it deploys machine learning to evaluate product performance from your feed and serve up products determined to be most relevant to users’ interests and most likely to generate conversions. To enable dynamic prospecting, you just need to link a product feed to a Display campaign.

Fine-tuned audience expansion. The Targeting expansion option available under campaign settings can be used to increase audience reach “to drive more conversions at the same average cost-per-acquisition (CPA).” The goal is to save advertisers the time of increasing bids to maximize budget toward the end of a budget or campaign cycle. Now there is a slider tool that you can use to increase or decrease reach. It shows weekly impression estimates as you adjust the setting.

Auto-generated custom intent segments. Audiences have been encroaching on the importance of keyword selection — particularly in Display campaigns — for several years. Google automatically creates and refreshes custom intent audiences based on the most common keywords and URLs in content that people view when looking into a product or service, also considering the existing audience targeting in your account.

“By using these segments, like local goods or electronics, you don’t have to manage hundreds or even thousands of keywords to reach the right customers,” said Tris Warkentin, Display ads product manager in the blog post. As columnist Grace Kaye has noted, these generated audiences can be a good option for newer or resource-crunched advertisers. Auto-created custom intent audiences are now available in English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, French and Italian.

Why you should care. Each of these features are powered at some level by machine learning, bringing more automation to the way Display campaigns target prospective customers.