Hey, guys. This is Christian Thomson and today I want to talk about the biggest epic fail in display marketing for our modern times. I like to call this one the kiddy clicker. You’ll find out why shortly. So here’s the scenario. You’re a home renovation company and you have a digital marketing campaign running a paid search campaign and you’re using display advertising to target potential customers. And let’s build an audience. So let’s say you’re a home rental company and you want to target professional females age 25 to 45, and that you know that they’re in-market for home renovations. So using the in-market audience of in-market, Google knows that they’ve currently been searching for home renovations.
They’ve visited similar websites. So they’re the perfect customer for you to target.
Now here’s the problem in display, what tends to happen is that those campaigns can get the kiddy clicker effect. What that is, is the targeting is perfect. The problem is, is the device in the hands that it’s held. So let’s think about it. I’m a parent of three kids. We’ve all been there. The kids silence the iPad, the iPhone long car journeys, you know, put the kids on the iPads. You need 20 minutes of just peace and quiet. Yeah, son here is my iPhone. And what happens is that device still has all the targeting metrics of you, the potential customer for the home renovation company, but now it’s in the hands of your children.
What we’ve seen, or I’ve seen it from the other side, is we find that kids will use the phone or iPad to play games, watch YouTube videos, all that kind of stuff. And our ads are being displayed on that device to the parents. But the kids have the device and now they’re clicking on the ads or they’re trying to get past the little bits in the games where they have to watch an ad. They’re forced to watch an ad to earn coins or they’re on YouTube and your video comes up and kids are kind of lazy and get distracted, so they end up watching the entire video. That costs you from a paid search point of view. Again, it just creates lots of impressions and lots of useless clicks. That happens quite a lot, and if you don’t really dive deep into your display campaigns, you’ll find it’s probably happening more than you’d really like it to happen.
So there are a few things you can do. One is actually going into your display campaign. So this is display and it can also count for retargeting or remarketing as well. If you’re remarketing to people that have been on the website, the same thing applies. Go into your Google ads campaign, the display campaign, and click on where my ads is shown and you’ll start to see placements like mobile apps or mobile games. And to be honest, they’re never really going to be high converting display ads even if they were being targeted to an adult and the adult was actually using the device.
Unless you’re specifically trying to advertise them on a mobile app or a mobile game, I would remove that completely from your, exclude it completely from your display advertising. If you’re remarketing with video or through YouTube, then have a look at where the same thing, the placements where your ads have been shown on the YouTube channels. You’ll notice that if your ad has been shown and the kid has been using the device, that there’s gonna be a lot of like PD Pi like kid kind of YouTube channels showing up there too, so you can start to exclude those. What you’ll find is, you’ll find that the quality of impressions will improve.
The quality of clicks will improve. The number of impressions will probably come down. Same with clicks, but at least you know that you’re not having that kiddy clicker effect. So hope you enjoyed that video. Go check out your display campaigns. Make sure that those pesky kids aren’t sucking up all your display advertising budget and speak to you soon.