A fellow list member asked me this question today:
“How do you run search and display in one campaign?”
Here’s my response:
“It’s called “Display Expansion” for search ads.
See details: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7193800?hl=en
I highly recommend to NOT use this because it will make analyzing performance much harder and the performance of the Display part almost always sucks (pardon my language).”
The reason the Display part of this campaign type shows horrible results is hidden in this one sentence in the Google documentation:
“Search campaigns that have spare search budgets and are opted into display expansion”
Sure, you might reach a lot of extra people by adding Display to the mix, but they most likely won’t be the right people.
Search ads and Display ads almost always require a different strategy, different targeting, different messaging, different creatives, different budgets, etc.
Avoid “Display Expansion” like COVID. It is designed to make Google money, not you. Choose ‘Search Network only’ to start.
– Nils