What is Google Display Network (GDN)?

What is GDN? It stands for Google Display Network. It’s a Google advertising tool for displaying your ads on Google partner sites.

If you want to get your brand widely recognised, retarget your audience and remarket to your existing customers to buy your products again, then we’d like to introduce you to GDN. GDN helps you reach your target groups and increase brand awareness which ultimately increases the purchase of your products and services.

Google Display Network Explained

Google Display Network (GDN) is one of Google’s advertising tools displaying both text ads and display ads in the form of banners or videos on Google partner websites. Today, there are over 2 million sites that are registered Google partners! Google approves the registered websites to ensure that they contain quality content and receive enough visitors for advertising through their websites to be effective.

Still wondering what GDN is in digital marketing? And how does GDN work? Think about the banner ads you usually see when you enter a website, that’s GDN in action!

If you use GDN ads, your target audience doesn’t need to search for your products via a search engine like Google, but they will see your products advertised on the websites they visit. This allows your target audience to see your products and services more often. The more they see your ads, the more credibility and attention your products gain, and the more chance there is that people will click to visit your website and make a purchase.

*Example of GDN on a website (sanook.com)

Types of GDN

GDN can be divided into 4 types:

1. Text Ads: advertisements with a headline, content and URL linking to your target page
2. Banner Ads or Image Ads: showing images of various sizes. GIF, JPG, and PNG formats are all acceptable
3. Responsive Ads: images or videos are automatically adjusted to fit the user’s screen
4. VDO Ads: video clip format

Why You Should Be Using GDN Advertising

The best thing about GDN is that it helps build and increase brand awareness amongst your target audience. You can determine the target group for your ads based on their habits, gender, age-range, interests, location, and even whether they have kids or not. Plus, GDN allows you to easily perform retargeting or remarketing later on.

On top of that, you can specify the URL of your target page, set the budget, schedule when to display your ads, and limit the frequency your ads appear so that your ads won’t bother your target audience too much.

GDN helps you advertise through a particular website when that website doesn’t allow you to select your target audience or schedule when your ads will appear, and is only limited to a monthly subscription. It greatly supports online advertising.

What Are the Differences between GDN & SEM and Which One Should You Use?

Advertising with Google can be roughly divided into 3 types:

1. Google Search Marketing or SEM
2. Google Display Network (GDN)
3. Video ads on YouTube

Each of these has its benefits, and can be used to support one another. If your brand has the budget, you should be using both GDN and SEM advertising, as when people see your brand or products on other websites often, they’re more likely to search for your brand via search engines.

Who Should Be Using GDN?

Now that you know what Google Display Network (GDN) is, you can use it to support your brand’s marketing goals. As mentioned earlier, GDN advertising increases brand awareness, making it a great choice for the following:

• Newly launched brands that want to create brand awareness and be recognised by their target audience
• Existing brands that plan to launch and promote new products
• Existing brands that aim to boost sales with current customers, or persuade potential customers to make purchases using retargeting and remarketing strategies

By now, you’ll be fully acquainted with what Google Display Network (GDN) is. In the next article, we will explore more about how to use GDN, as well as the size and formats you should choose. Stay tuned!