The keys to Google's Discovery Ads: focus on conversions

Google's Discovery campaigns is the platform's solution that allows advertisers to launch more compelling and visually appealing ads with the goal of attracting higher quality users for brands. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• What are Google Discovery Ads?
• Google Discovery Ads vs Display Ads
• Setting up a Google Discovery Ads campaign and specifications
• Google Discovery Ads Best Practices

Google Ads Discovery campaigns allow you to reach more than 3 billion customers across all platform feeds. Through audience signals and consumer intent, Google makes Discovery campaigns personalized, visual and engaging experiences for users.

Google Discovery Ads gives you access to YouTube, Discover feeds and Gmail's Promotions and Social tabs allowing you to achieve greater reach with a single campaign.

Discovery campaigns are designed for companies that, with their creative, are looking to increase conversions on a large scale, reach new customers or reconnect with valuable customers.

Google Discovery Ads vs Display Ads

A priori, Discovery campaigns work in a similar way to Display campaigns. The advertiser provides Google with a series of resources that the platform automatically combines to find the best performing compositions.

The main difference between these two types of Google Ads campaigns is that Discovery Ads are specifically designed for three Google-owned mobile apps (YouTube, Gmail and Discover) and tailored to be aesthetically congruent with them. Whereas Display Ads allow you to appear on millions of websites, apps and Google properties (such as YouTube) to achieve your marketing goals.

Let's take a look at some other differences between these two Google campaigns:

• Appearance: Discovery ads can be created from one image or a carousel of up to 10 images, which can be square, horizontal or vertical. Display ads do not offer the carousel option, but include the video option for YouTube.
• Bidding: Discovery campaigns are focused on conversions, so the possible bidding strategies are Maximize Conversions or CPA Target. On the other hand, Display campaigns allow you to bid on clicks, impressions, conversions, conversion value, ROAS or even adjust the bid manually.
• Targeting: Although both types of campaigns use the same targeting methods, such as retargeting or custom audiences, Discovery ads are shown to users with higher intent.
• Forms: Unlike display ads, discovery ads allow you to include a lead form in Gmail so you can extract user information directly from the ad.

Setting up a Google Discovery Ads campaign and specifications

If your goal is to get more coverage in your Google campaigns, captivate consumers by showcasing your brand or products and promote actions among users from the right audience, you should consider adding Discovery to your Google Ads strategy.

How to set up a Discovery Ads campaign

1. Set up the campaign
In this first step we will create the new campaign and define the marketing objective (sales, leads, website traffic or none). In the case of Discovery Ads all the goals are conversion goals and your campaign will be optimized to achieve that goal.

You will also have to choose the most appropriate conversion goal to achieve your sales goal, the geographic targeting and the language of your campaign. Finally remember to select the bidding strategy, enter the average daily budget and select your audiences.

2. Create discovery ads

When creating ads for your Discovery campaign, you can choose between single image ads or carousel ads with multiple images. Depending on which option you choose, the asset specifications will vary.

Specification of discovery ad resources

Carousel discovery ad resource specifications

Google Discovery Ads Best Practices

As you have seen, discovery campaigns allow you to display your brand on all Google feeds and impact users willing to discover products and services. Let's review some of Google's best practices for getting users to take action with this type of campaign.

Bidding and budget

• Discovery campaigns perform best with high daily budgets. In fact, Google recommends making 10x your daily budget relative to your CPA value.
• Set your bidding strategy based on your objectives. 
  • Maximize conversions: It will allow you to spend your budget in the most efficient way while maximizing the volume of conversions.
  • Target CPA: If you have a specific performance objective, Google Ads includes the objective CPA automatic bidding strategy that allows you to choose bids automatically to help you get the maximum conversions with your budget.
  • Target ROAS: This is one of the types of Google Ads Smart Bidding strategy. Google intelligently analyzes the value of a potential conversion every time a user searches for your products or services. With respect to that value, your bids are automatically adjusted to those searches, maximizing the return on investment.
• Use the Google Ads simulators for bids and budgets to analyze how the weekly performance of your ads can change with different strategies.
• Try to give time to your campaigns to optimize their performance.
• Google recommends that the duration of the test phase should be at least 3 weeks and ideally 3 months.
• Wait until you have at least 40 conversions in your ad group before making any changes.
  If you modify your target CPA, make sure that the change in bidding is a maximum of 20%.

Audiences

• As you may already know, in order to achieve your conversion goals you must impact potential customers. In fact, advertisers that combine retargeting and prospecting audiences can achieve 81% higher conversion rates and 25% lower CPAs.
• Google recommends starting with low funnel audiences and then enabling automation with optimized targeting. Start by including 10-15 keywords in your custom audiences to impact users who have searched Google for those terms. From there, you can expand your audiences by using your online and offline data to re-engage existing customers or other audiences that have interacted with your company. You can also find additional customers with Similar Audiences to your data. 

Creatives

• Google recommends using the "rule of 3". That is, add at least 3 images of each type (square, horizontal and vertical), 3 headlines and 3 descriptions.
  • Including all 3 types of images will give your campaign the opportunity to maximize its reach.
  • With a variety of images and texts you will allow the system to learn which compositions get better results.
• Do not include low quality assets, remember that the minimum is 1200 x 68 to follow google guidelines. You can check that all assets are approved in the asset report.
  • Google recommends reviewing it every 2-3 weeks to identify those resources with better results.
• Work the descriptions to be fairly long, specific and direct and include a call to action and an offer if you can.
• Keep in mind that ads should also be mobile-friendly.