3 Steps to Help You Choose the Right Websites

 Don’t make the mistake of putting your ad up on the wrong website (image source)

Display ads created…check. Display campaign set up…check. Display Network Placements…you’re lost. How are you going to figure out what websites you’re going to use to get in front of your target audience?

Here are 3 ways to discover the right websites for your display network placements:

1) Learn Who Your Target Audience Is

Learn about the people who are using your product. Get down to the nitty gritty. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to get in front of them.

When trying to figure out what websites you want to use for display network placements, knowing where your target audience spends their time online is going to go a long way.  Take a few minutes and brainstorm about what websites your audience spends their time on. Write this list down and make sure to add those sites to your display campaign.

2) Learn Who Your Advertising Competition Is

If you’re like most people, your above list will be pretty small. If you don’t already have a list of your advertising competition, then do a quick google search on your target keywords and see who else is advertising. Write this list down along with each competitors URL.

3) Learn Where Your Competition Is Advertising

Here is where a lot of people will get stuck. I’ll tell you about a little method that will get you quick results so you can have your campaign up and running in no time:

Once I have my small list of competitors, I prefer going to whatrunswhere.com in order to find out where the competitors are running their ads.

If your company is new to display network placement, you probably don’t have good data on what websites will work best.  If you don’t have that data, it is generally a pretty good practice to see what your competition is doing, and emulate them until you can accrue enough personal data.

Here are a series of screen shots explaining how you can go about this process. This is one of the quickest ways to discover the right websites for your display network placements. In this example, I use Nike as the base ‘ad competitor’ to learn where they are running their display network placements: