Google Ads vs DSPs: What you need to know.
In today’s article, we will cover the biggest differences between Google Ads and DSP’s.
Google Ad’s is a great way to take your first steps into paid advertising for your business. We all know that search is an integral piece of the marketing mix to get your business’ first sales or clients. However, as some of you will have seen, Google Ad’s also offers the ability of Display advertising. Not sure what display advertising is? Read our breakdown here.
Some marketers will start their display journey on Google Ads. It is easy to access, sure. But its not a good representation of what you can do with Display. At Petram Digital, we always provide our clients with cost-effective access to enterprise-grade Display capabilities to take your first steps into this complicated landscape. They’re also the reasons we always buy Display outside of Google Ads.
The first key differentiator of the two is Scale. Now you might be thinking:
“well I only have small budgets so scale isn’t important to me”
You’d be wrong. The reason scale on a fundamental level is so important is because of how the algorithms spending your budget can operate. The more publishers they have to look at, the more data they receive, the better decisions they can make and ultimately the more efficient your campaign becomes.
Adwords only has access to Adsense plus some other elements of Ad manager (Google’s enterprise grade Ad exchange formerly known as Doubleclick ad exchange).
DSP’s however have access to Ad manager (which includes all of Adsense) AND around 200 other ad exchanges all boasting their own curated portfolio of publishers.
This is important as if you have a niche product and you require a somewhat nice customer your diamond in the rough publisher whose entire audience is exactly what your product is aimed at could be out of your reach on Google Ads.
Not good.
Related to this is the ability to purchase inventory from a specific publisher. In the example above if there is one site that has the perfect audience for your product, you would surely want to show off your product there as much as possible right?
In Google Ads, the only way to do this would be to create a specific ad group only targeting that publisher and hope that you get delivery there. Nine times out of ten you will get an insignificant amount even if you custom bid extra high just because of how Google likes to apportion bids and deliver inventory to different advertisers for its publishers.
On a DSP however, we are not bound by this. We have the ability to reach out that publisher and ask to buy as much of their impressions as we can afford and guarantee that you can get on that site. What we also have the ability to do though, is layer in some of the important elements like frequency (how often a user of that site sees your ads) and any other particular parameters (time of day, day of week, device, browser etc) that you might find important. Plus report on it all for analysis after the fact!
Very good.
The next key differentiator between the two platforms is Data.
Data powers digital advertising. The key selling point of display advertising is being able to show adverts to relevant people.
In Google Ads, you are limited to using Googles audiences. In our experience these are excellent and varied enabling you to test and learn from many different angles and with the right reporting feeding this back to you to learn who your typical customers are and what they like.
However Google is not the only seller of data. We have had many clients that have extremely niche targeting requirements or indeed specific campaigns that require specialised data to get right. On DSP’s you have access to an enormous repository of data segments from highly reputable vendors that can genuinely provide a solution to a campaign that seems impossible to deliver upon.
A classic example of this is LinkedIn. LinkedIn sell data segments of users for you to purchase and use as a layer across your display advertising. Let’s pretend you’re a restaurant and looking for a new chef in your city.
With LinkedIn data and a good DSP you could buy Food Service Workers and target just your city (even a radius around your restaurant on mobile!) to entice people to apply for your position. You could implement a pixel on the relevant page and have the DSP optimise towards that to generate more applications over time.
Pretty cool. And only possible on a DSP.
Arguably the element with the greatest difference between the two platform is creative format. Being able to differentiate your business in the sea of other Advertisers online is incredibly important.
Google Ads gives you the option to use typical image ads, text ads and native ads. A pretty good selection! It can also dynamically build each based on the set of assets you provide the platform.
However. Consider the amount of advertisers who are using Google Ads. How much they are spending and for how long they have been doing it. Then consider how long Google Ads (Adwords) has been around.
These are everywhere.
This is not to say that they don’t perform (because they do). However, it means that you are limited to these sizes forever.
On DSP’s we have the option of doing all of the above and many, many more. Below are some examples of what Display & Video 360 (Google’s DSP) offers:
All of these use the same kind of assets that you would use in Google Ads but provide a prospective customer with a totally different way of engaging with your business. This means that you stand out.
This is important. It means that you get noticed which is exactly why you are doing paid advertising – to get your business noticed.
The final differentiator we want to cover is Cost.
All of display advertising is conducted on a Cost per Mille (CPM or the cost per one thousand impressions) basis. This means you are paying a small amount for each time you show an ad to a person.
On Google Ads, you pay per click. Now – we can totally see how this could be seen as efficient. The impressions are free (and people still do things from impressions) and you only pay if they click.
Great – sounds like free advertising! Which it sort of is… except
If the rest of the ecosystem is operating on an impression basis and are capable of selling on an impression, Google is still paying for these impressions on your behalf but charging you if a click happens. If Google sees that your ads are not generating the levels of clicks that result in profit for them they change where your ads are shown. If we learnt here that most of display advertising results in viewthrough conversions you can be in a position where your campaign is generating you very healthy results but is not good for Google.
Bad news.
On DSP’s, all buying and paying is done on a CPM. That means you do literally pay for impressions. You will be optimising towards the event which drives revenue for your business. Even if that site that you are purchasing generates very few clicks but results in lots of sales the DSP will buy more making you campaign more efficient, scalable and most importantly TOTALLY in your control.
So there we have it – the top differences between Google Ads and DSPs and why they are important for you when you take your first steps into Display.