Google Ads is undeniably the first ad platform that people think of in terms of online advertising. It attracts a lot of users for both search and display ads because of its relatively simple-to-use interface, as well as an expansive ad network that includes millions of websites across the Internet.
However, programmatic advertising has become the number one way that businesses buy display ad space on the Internet. This is a unique approach that doesn’t use a middle-man like Google Ads.
This discussion will compare and contrast programmatic advertising versus the Google Display Network to help you decide which is best for your organization’s needs.
How Does Each Approach Work?
The first thing to discuss is how these two approaches to display advertising actually work. These differences will help you understand the advantages and disadvantages of each option.
The Google Display Network Approach
The Google Display Network is essentially a middleman between you (the advertiser) and the websites allowing you to publish your ads on their pages (the publishers).
With Google Ads’ easy, straightforward interface, advertisers can target audiences based on a number of different options and criteria. This makes it easy to find individuals that fit your ideal customer profile.
And, the Display Network has a large network of millions of websites, including YouTube and Gmail.
Ad placements on the Google Display Network are typically decided by bids, as well as quality scores. This is a Google-assigned rating used to assess how well your ads will perform.
The Programmatic Advertising Approach
In programmatic advertising, there is no middle-man service. There is just an ad exchange, which is a site where ad inventory, also known as placements, are sold. Advertisers use a display-side portal, where they enter information about the desired audience. Publishers use a supply-side portal and enter information about how much available ad space they have.
When a user that matches your audience profile visits a publisher’s site, you automatically enter an auction with other advertisers interested in the same user. These auctions happen in real-time and are over in milliseconds. The highest bidder wins the auction.
Machine learning tools are used to buy ad placements that are most valuable to your business.
Which Approach Is Better?
To understand whether Google Display Network or programmatic advertising is best, let’s look at some essential advertising criteria and compare how these two approaches perform for each category.
Reach
You want your ads to reach a lot of people. More reach means more viewers and more potential opportunities to convert those views into new customers. Reach is also important because you may have very niche audience groups that would otherwise be hard to target with messages.
The Google Display Network has the largest audience base of an ad service. You can reach the majority of Internet users with this approach. However, the programmatic approach actually has a slight edge.
With the right display-side portal, you can have access to multiple ad networks at once, including the Google Display Network. In other words, you’ll have access to the same audience as the GDN, and then more!
Targeting
Google Display Network is known for its expansive list of targeting options. Programmatic advertising also offers many of the same targeting features. Here is a quick summary of the options offered by both advertising approaches:
- Keyword targeting: Selecting words that relate to your business and its products.
- Interest targeting: Select interests that your target audience shares.
- Topic targeting: Similar to keywords, these are longer topics and ideas that your audience members are interested in.
- Demographic targeting: Using audience information like age, location, income level, and more to target relevant individuals.
That said, programmatic advertising does have a slight edge again because they use a number of third-party data aggregates. This gives a more complete picture of each user and allows for deeper, more niche targets.
Ad Types
In either approach, advertisers are open to using images, videos, rich media files, HTML 5 and other display ad formats. This gives advertisers a lot of creative freedom when designing display ad messages. Plus, formats like rich media and video are especially engaging to audiences.
In this category, it is a draw. You could argue that programmatic advertising and display-side portals have fewer restrictions when it comes to ad formats, but this is only a slight advantage.
In fact, some of these ads do more harm than good because they produce disruptive experiences. While it may get the audience's attention, it will be more annoying than engaging. This is why Google restricts these media formats.
When it comes to video ads, in particular, Google Ads has a more clear edge because you can create YouTube video campaigns. Since YouTube is an incredibly popular and successful site, this is a big advantage.
Pricing And Bidding Options
Advertisers need to think about cost-effectiveness and how to stretch their budget to the furthest extent. You want to use every dollar to achieve results! Thus, you need bidding options that suit your advertising goals.
This is where Google Ads really shines. They have several bidding options that advertisers can use, each with its own advantages. You can choose between:
- CPC: This is the go-to method for search ads, but it is also an effective display ad bidding option where you pay each time someone clicks your ad.
- CPM: This is an impression-based bidding strategy where the cost is decided for every thousand impressions.
- CPA: For conversion-focused campaigns, cost-per-action charges based on conversion activities taking place.
With programmatic advertising, the only bidding or pricing option is the CPM method. That means if you have a click or conversion-focused goals, you’ll still pay for impressions.
Essentially, this means that programmatic advertising is not as universal as Google Ads and only fits well into certain advertising strategies.
It’s also worth mentioning that in terms of total ad spend, most display-side portals ask for a minimum of $5000 to $10,000 to be spent each month. Google Ads, on the other hand, has no minimum, which makes it a much safer option for smaller companies and new advertisers.
Conclusions
Programmatic advertising has its advantages. You can reach more people, you have deeper targeting options and fewer restrictions when it comes to rich media ads. That said, it is much more difficult to use compared to Google Ads.
If you have a small budget or are new to display advertising, Google Ads is still your best option. Once you get familiar with how it works and your budget has grown slightly, then you can explore the programmatic advertising approach.
Here are just a few of our top Google Display Network tips and strategies to use when running ads on GDN.
