How can I avoid paying for clicks from non-prospects in my Display campaigns?

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Display campaigns can become expensive if you’re paying for clicks from people who aren’t interested in taking up your offers. These may include: children or others who are clicking by accident, people from overseas, competitors who click your ads to make you pay more (yes it happens), people looking for employment, or people who are merely curious, but not really that interested.

CPCs (Cost Per Click) in Google Display can be really low, but if only a handful of people clicking on your ads are valuable to you, then you will get poor ROI from Display.

Did you know you can change how you pay for your ads, so that you only pay for people who click and then interact?

Here’s a few tips for getting around this issue.

1. People don’t typically buy immediately after clicking a display ad. They are more likely to explore your website, sign up for an email promotion or look at prices at this stage, since they are so early in the sales process. Set a conversion for Display that is realistic for the stage these users are in. I recommend setting a conversion for users who stay longer than 1 minute after clicking through from Display.

1. Create a custom conversion set just for your display ads. Add your early funnel interaction to this conversion set, along with transactions, lead generation etc.

1. Set your bidding to maximize conversions initially. Most of the conversions will be engaged users and not transactions, but that is fine for Display.

1. Set your geographical region, and set it to people “in” the location, not people “interested in” the location to prevent getting clicks from overseas.

1. Once you have more than 100 conversions in a month, your display ads should be eligible for a “Pay Per Conversion” bidding type. Select this and choose how much you want to pay for a person staying more than 1 minute. Once this setting has been configured you’ll no longer pay for clicks – instead you’ll be paying for people who stay longer than a minute.

1. If you have a large budget and a lot of people coming to your website, change to pay for a larger conversion such as users adding to cart, users who stay for more than 3 minutes. If you sell a lot of product, you may even want to set a Pay Per Conversion for transactions, but keep in mind that Google will pull back your impressions if they don’t think they will get a return on displaying your ads, so don’t make it too hard for Google to get paid.

1. If you suspect your competitors are clicking your ads, you might try software that tracks your users IP addresses and then you can block certain IP addresses from all your campaigns.

This tip and many others are found at https://www.petramanos.com/category/tips/