The most tempting thing to do when your Search Ads launch is of course, go to Google and search terms that would trigger your ad to show up. It’s a simple check and balances right? My marketing agency told me my ads are live, let me search some of the keywords we agreed upon and ensure I have a presence to the audience I am trying to reach. While it seems innocent, I strongly advise against this.
In 2000, Google launched AdWords, a platform for running text ads on desktop Search, with roughly 350 advertisers. During that time, AdWords offered the most technologically advanced features that enabled advertisers to quickly design a flexible program to achieve their digital marketing goals.
The Google Display Network (GDN) has a growing list of ways to reach potential customers. To do so, we can target audiences (in-market audiences, affinity audiences, demographics, etc.) or content (topics, keywords, etc.). To take that a step further, we can layer different types of targeting to truly pinpoint a subset of users or we can simply observe how different types of people interact with our ads. This is where the very important distinction between targeting settings come into play.