Why you should turn off optimized targeting in GDN today

Google introduced a feature called “optimized targeting” for Google Display Network, or GDN, campaigns in 2021. 

This feature promises to look beyond your campaigns’ manually selected audiences to seek out ones you may have missed. 

Google touts that it can find new customers beyond your existing audience without increasing bids and still meet your goals.

Sounds enticing, right?

But while it might seem like this feature could scale your campaign and improve its performance, the reality is that it will place your ad on irrelevant websites and generate a high volume of invalid clicks, ultimately resulting in poor performance.

Navigating this feature

Optimized targeting is automatically enabled when you create a GDN campaign at the ad group level. 

This means that unless you specifically disable it, your campaigns will be subject to this feature right from the outset.

When testing this feature, several significant issues crop up:

Google operates a black-box approach with optimized targeting 

This means you have little insight into how this feature performs compared to your chosen audiences. 

There is, however, the option to see how it performs compared to your manually selected segments. 

Go to your GDN campaign > Audiences. At the bottom of the audience segment report, review the row for Total: Expansion and Optimized Targeting.

Optimized targeting can – and will – eat away at your budgets 

In one campaign, it spent a staggering 99% of our budget, leaving little room for targeting our selected audiences.

The term ‘optimized’ is somewhat misleading 

Instead of improving campaign performance, it led to levels of invalid click traffic that surpassed “valid” traffic. 

This inflated traffic wasted our budget and skewed our performance metrics.

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Let’s look at an example

When a client wanted to run display campaigns to expand their reach, we launched them with optimized targeting turned on to test the feature. 

As we monitored these campaigns, we compared the performance of display campaigns with optimized targeting on versus those with it off. 

Our findings

Campaigns opted into vs. opted out of optimized targeting in the same 30-day period

Opted into Opt. TargetingInvalid CTRYes66%No26%Difference-60%

Campaign before and after opting out of optimized targeting 

Time PeriodImpressionsInvalid ClicksInvalid CTRBefore3,492,34831,46166%After3,3357365,15445%Difference-4%-84%-31%Comparing the 30-day periods before and after opting out of optimized targeting. 

In this instance, campaigns with optimized targeting turned on generated a notably higher invalid click rate at 66%, compared to just 26% when it was off – a difference of 60%. 

After turning off optimized targeting, invalid clicks significantly decreased by 84% (from 31,400 to 5,200) while impression volume remained stable. Invalid CTR dropped from 66% to 45%, a 31% improvement. 

The data shows that turning off optimized targeting led to a substantial decrease in invalid click volume and CTR. 

Even though our client’s primary goal was to expand reach regardless of click quality, turning it off did not impact impression volume. 

Disabling this feature proved to be a viable strategy for improving traffic quality and reducing invalid click activity in display campaigns. 

The lesson here is to consider disabling optimized targeting on your display campaigns. 

How to tread carefully with this feature

Optimized targeting led to difficult-to-see insights, budget disappearances and invalid click traffic. 

Given all of the above, here are three recommendations for proceeding with the feature:

• If you have optimized targeting turned on, closely examine its performance. Determine if it is delivering value or just consuming your budget.
• If you decide it is not for you, include a step in your GDN campaign launch process to disable this feature. In most cases, you will unlikely need it turned on.
• If you’ve unknowingly opted into optimized targeting, analyze your invalid click traffic in your GDN campaigns against the invalid click credit you received in your transaction history. In our test case, we found that we were grossly under-credited for our invalid click traffic. Reach out to your Google representative to see if an additional review of invalid click traffic can be done and whether you deserve additional compensation from this feature.

While optimized targeting might seem beneficial at first glance, it’s essential to approach it cautiously. 

Its potential to drain budgets and drive invalid traffic can outweigh the benefits it promises. Don’t hesitate to disable it and protect your advertising budget from some unnecessary expenditure.

Dig deeper: How to make your display campaigns profitable