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Google Ads gives you the ability to advertise on Google’s widely used properties and network of partner websites. It’s an effective way to reach your target audience by tapping into their data resources and selecting which outlets you want your ads to appear on.

To access this, you’ll need to work with the Google Display Network. It consists of hundreds of thousands of websites your ads can be eligible to show on. Each site, regardless of its size and popularity, has been approved to be part of this network.

In this post, I’d like to dive a little deeper into Google’s Display Network, which offers some interesting options your financial institution’s marketing team may not be aware of yet.

Topic Targeting

Topic targeting allows you to target sites that have related content to what you’d like to focus on. Google will try to match your topic choices with web content that’s related to it. Financial institutions can choose from topics like:

• Banking
• Credit & Lending
• Financial Planning & Management
• Investments

For a broader reach, try selecting sites which you know your account holders have other interests in. For instance, if you’re trying to build up mortgage loan or home equity line of credit accounts, select topics related to home buying and renovation.

Managed Placements

Managed Placements allows you to select which sites you’d specifically like to advertise on. There are thousands of individual websites to choose from. So if you have few in mind already, try typing in the URL to see if it part of their network. Sites available include:

• 20somethingfinance.com – 500K – 1 million weekly impressions
  A site like this can help you connect with millennial aged and younger audiences.
• Zillow.com with 200M – 250M weekly impressions
  This can help you connect with potential home buyers who will be in need of a loan.

You can also target specific videos and apps.

It’s great to go with Managed Placements if you have a very specific audience or goal in mind. If you’re going with a broad reach, it may be best to allow Google to automatically select sites.

Gmail

Globally, there are 1.5 billion Gmail account users. Locally, we can assume that it’s the primary email platform people are using.

Gmail ads show up when you’re logged in and checking your inbox or are using the Gmail APP.

When an ad is clicked on, it can take the user to a landing page on your website. It can also expand to the size of an email and display:

• A specific message
• Embed a form for lead acquisition
• Show a video

Your ads can also be “starred” or saved by users so they can view it again later. They can even forward the email ad to someone else.

YouTube

Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. Yes, people are watching random videos. But they’re also using it for research so they can learn more about a topic. They could want to know more about house hunting, mortgages, car buying, etc.

You can leave it up to Google to choose which channels you advertise on or you can choose relevant YouTube channels. A couple of channels include:

• The Financial Diet with over 700,000 subscribers
• Car Buyer, which has over 550,000 subscribers

Are you interested in trying some of these advertising options? Contact us and we can help you determine a budget!