The hierarchy of an ad campaign on ResearchGate follows the logic below:
Campaign > Ad groups > Ads
Campaigns
On the campaign level, pick an objective that best suits your goal as a business. This also determines how you get billed for your campaigns.
Brand awareness campaigns are delivered on a cost per thousand impressions ("CPM") basis. Campaigns with the "Get traffic to your website" objective are delivered with a cost per click ("CPC") model.
Tip
Create separate campaigns for different marketing initiatives in your business, for example with campaigns for each product line.
This will also help you with monitoring your results and allocating budgets.
Ad groups
In ad groups you set the targeting, budget, and schedule of your campaign. Create multiple ad groups to segment your target audience, or test different targeting strategies.
Ad groups allow you to set some of the most critical aspects of your campaign on ResearchGate: who you are targeting, when your campaign is running, and what budget you are committing to the campaign.
Targeting
ResearchGate Ads offers over 1,000 distinct audience segments that allow you to describe your targeting audience in terms of location, research area, seniority, and type of industry. Combining different targeting dimensions enables you to target your campaign most effectively.
Tip
Test several targeting strategies in different ad groups to see which audience responds best to your campaign.
Get targeting suggestions
The "Suggest audiences" feature allows you to enter your landing page URL, or targeting terms that you might already have, to get suggestions for matching ResearchGate targeting segments.
Schedule & budget
First, set the start and end date of your ad group to specify when your ad should be shown on ResearchGate. Make sure that your landing page and the journey you want visitors to take is available during that time.
You can choose between a daily and lifetime budget. With a daily budget, the set amount is the limit of what should be spend on each day the ad group is running. Lifetime budgets define the total amount that you want to spend throughout the total runtime of the ad group.
Generally, the cost of advertising should be relative to the price of products or services you are selling. Your rate should be determined by how much you're willing to pay for clicks of potential customers to your website, and the value of your brand to be promoted on ResearchGate.
Tip
Start with lower rates and budgets to see how well your campaign is delivering. If you regularly hit your campaign's budget limit, consider increasing it. If you don't spend your budget as planned, try to set a higher rate or extend your targeting criteria.
Ads
Ads make up the actual message of your campaign, consisting of your logo, image headline, short description and call-to-action. This is the content that your audience sees and interacts with to get to your landing page.
To ensure a valuable experience for researchers and advertisers, we have an approval process for ads. During this process, we check that all ads comply with ResearchGate's advertising guidelines.
When creating your ad, you can specify the following content elements:
- Advertiser name (30 characters max.)
- Headline (45 characters max.)
- Description (105 characters max.)
- Call-to-action (10 options)
- Advertiser logo (45x45 px image)
- Main image (310x160 px image)
Tip
To achieve the best results, make sure your landing page matches your ad. When someone clicks on your ad, they expect to land on a page that is relevant to what they saw in your ad.
Find out which ads work best with testing
Multiple ads within an ad group will automatically be shown in an even rotation. This allows you to compare and test different variants of an ad.
Adding tracking parameters
If you are using Google Analytics or a similar tool for reporting, you can use the "Add tracking" function to apply UTM parameters to your destination URL. This will help you identify visitors coming from your campaign on ResearchGate.
