Don't Be Fooled By High CTR and Low CPC Dispay Advertising

It’s probably complete junk

Is it just me, or has spam/junk/bot traffic on the Google Display Network reached an ‘all time high’ (unlike the stock market, it seems).

I feel like you used to get a decent spread of quality sites in your placement reports when running any form of audience/topic/keyword targeting, with a “manageable” amount of garbage to discard.

These days, it’s like digging on your hands and knees through a manure-filled haystack to find a needle … unless you’re doing exclusively placement targeting from the start (even aggressively blocking mobile apps and known spam domains is resembling a giant game of whack-a-mole more than ever before).

What makes this particularly problematic, in my view, is that this junk traffic often looks good at a glance: high CTRs, low CPCs. It’s easy to get misled because you are being fed numbers that “look good” on screen.

I see this play out a lot for small and mid-sized businesses that run Display campaigns, where in-house marketers are juggling too many balls at once and don’t have the time (or know-how) to dig into the weeds of GDN placement reports.

The reality is you can set up a campaign in good faith, targeting audiences and keywords, only to find the clicks are coming from trash-tier sites you’d never consciously spend a cent on.

And the worst bit?

Google doesn’t care at all, because they know most advertisers won’t check (or don’t know how to) and will gladly shout from the rooftops about “great” CTRs and CPCs that inflate perceived performance, all while burning budget on useless traffic.

The bottom line? Don’t judge Google Display campaign performance by CTR and CPC alone. Open up your placement report and take a good, honest look. Cull the junk. Just ensure you have a time machine handy, as you could waste the rest of your life doing so.

Not sure what you’re looking at or don’t have time to deal with it? Flick me a message - I’m happy to take a look.