Display Ads Archives - Four15 Digital

Images Ads Sizes Google Ads Accepts

Google has made working with true image ads increasingly difficult. Image ads can only be uploaded via Google Ads Editor now, and no longer via the UI. However, for many advertisers, traditional image ads perform the best. Four15 Digital recommends that you try image ads in addition to your RDAs. You may not be able to find the documentation on what Google even accept now, so below is a full list of dimentions they should accept. There are other image ads requirements related to size (150kb max, use a compresion tool if needed) and format (jpg, png and a few other file types will work). Please note Google is very particular with their image requirements. If you are off by a single pixel they will not accept the file. Most Popular Image ad Sizes Image Sizes for Image Ads:

How to Set Up Display Campaigns

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An Overview of Targeting Options on the Google Display Network

Have you ever purchased something from an advertisement you saw while browsing your favorite sites or apps? Or maybe you were shocked to see an ad for something you researched, mentioned, or even just thought about buying a while ago? What you likely saw was the Google Display Network (GDN) in action. Spanning across 2 million websites and reaching over 90% of people on the internet, GDN serve ads to users while they browse websites, Gmail, YouTube, and apps. Unlike Search Engine Marketing (SEM), display ads are less direct in that users don’t have as much intent as they would when searching specifically for what they want. This means that Impressions and CPC’s are cheaper to come by – but you shouldn’t underestimate the power of these ads. With advancements in machine learning, Google’s algorithms are better able to understand the customer journey and serve the right ads at the right time and place. Since there’s less intent with display ads, advertisers must put more of an emphasis on targeting in order to maximize their spend. In this article, I’ll explain how to set up targeting for a successful display campaign. Targeting Options There are 2 categories of targeting users on the Google Display Network: audience and contextual. Audience targeting is based on specific users who may have visited your site before (remarketing), are in the market for a given product (im-market), or fall within specific demographics. With contextual targeting you can place ads on specific website/app URL’s (assuming they’re a part of GDN) on pages that contain specific keywords or topics that you indicate. In addition to the type of targeting, you can also select the degree of “Targeting Expansion” you’d like each ad group to target. Increasing your reach allows Google to broaden your targeting based on audiences similar to your target audience. I recommend setting this to “Off” at the initial launch so that budget gets focused on your selected targets before allowing Google to expand beyond and find potential customers. Contextual Targeting Placements Placements are specific sites or apps you want your ads to appear. This is useful if you’re, let’s say, a life science company and you know which life science websites (or any website) that you know your ideal customers are browsing. Since Google’s reach is so extensive, there’s a good chance that the place you want to advertise is within the network. To evaluate the performance of your placements, you can view “Placements > Where Ads Showed” and pull the data to see which placements are wasting money. If you spot any “bleeding” placements you can easily exclude them from your ad groups and campaigns. Keywords and Topics Contextual targeting allows you to target ads on specific URL’s or content that’s based on keywords that you specify. I recommend using a list of 15-30 keywords that are about 1-3 tokens long (e.g. “raw denim” = 2 tokens) so that Google can better match your keywords to pages and serve ads on placements that are highly relevant to your business. If your keywords have too many phrases and your topics are uncommon then you might receive the following warning and your ads won’t serve. When adding keywords you’ll also be asked to select the “Keyword setting” that you want to target – either audience, topic, or keyword. Google recently sunsetted the audience keyword option in April 2019 in favor of custom intent audiences based on keywords. I like to use the keyword setting so that I have more control if I want to exclude certain keywords. Just like placement targeting, you can analyze the performance of certain placements and exclude them; this can’t be done with audiences. Audience Targeting The 2nd targeting category is for audiences, which is especially helpful in remarketing since Google can keep track of users that visit your site and serve ads to those same users while they browse elsewhere You’ll find the standard options for audiences such as: “in-market”, “custom intent”, and “custom affinity” below. I’d suggest giving these audiences a try if you’re desperate to expand your reach. Google’s machine learning improves over time so you can be confident that they’ll find you the right customers. That said, I highly recommend you review performance here to make sure everything is going as planned. Protip: If you navigate to “Tools & Settings” > “Audience manager” > “Audience Insights”, you can see Google’s recommendations for audiences based on their index. Index refers to frequency with which audiences appear on your list vs the general population. For example, if your index on flights is “4x” this means you have 4 times as many users on your list then expected. Summary Now you should be ready to target your advertising on the Google Display Network and I hope you’re excited! Display ads are a great way to reach customers no matter their stage on the customer journey. They’re relatively cheap and can yield great results when done right. But don’t think that targeting is all you need; good creative is equally as important. So what if your ad gets in front of your ideal customers? If your ad doesn’t compel them to click (and convert), then your hard work is all for naught. For tips on maximizing your creative material please browse our educational materials. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out or maybe you’ll find what you’re looking for on our site. Thanks!

Discovering Discovery Campaigns

In Q4 2018 Google opened a new beta, introducing a new campaign type called “Discovery Campaigns.” Discovery campaigns are designed with the ever changing digital landscape in mind, allowing advertisers to “Create visually rich, personalized ads that drive engagement with their brand across YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and more.” This follows along my suspicions that Google will one day rely entirely on user data to serve ads to users instead of keywords. Using Discovery Campaigns, Google’s machine learning capabilities can hypertarget customized ads to users based on their online activity on Google and its partner sites. As advertisers, it means we have less control over building campaigns and give more control to Google’s black box of algorithms. The benefit is that it gives account managers more time to ponder over other aspects of marketing strategy. In essence, Google wants to predict what you want, when you want it – and eventually, before you want it. Four15 Digital was granted exclusive access to this beta and immediately began testing on some of our larger clients. So far, our results have been positive. Almost 2 weeks since launching Discovery campaigns,we have started to see potential in this new campaign. Creating a Discovery Campaign Once you are in the beta, from the homescreen, discovery campaigns can be found under the 3 standard campaign types: To create a new campaign, click on the “+” button. You’ll find the standard campaign and ad group settings just as you would trying to create other campaign types. Note, Discovery campaigns are only available for the following goal options: Once you’ve created your campaign you will be prompted to create your ad – Discovery Carousel or Discovery. Both ad types require a headline, description, business name, and at least 1 card. A card consists of 2 images, a headline, a final card URL, and a call to action text. The difference between the 2 ad types is that the carousel can handle up to 10 cards. Below are some examples of ads. At the time of writing this article, there’s a note in the UI stating, “Ads are currently only available on computers via Gmail until more support is added.” Therefore, you might want to skip out on this campaign type entirely if your mobile page isn’t up to snuff. And the results back that statement up as most views come from mobile and tablets.So far, our performance has been good, but we need more time before we can decisively give an opinion on Discovery Ads. We’ve requested to be whitelisted for more of our accounts since our initial findings are promising. One thing to note is that we did notice volume drop off after the initial week – which is unfortunate because the initial week did very well in terms of conversions. We’ll be sure to keep you posted on any new findings. Stay up to date with any new findings by following Four15 Digital on LinkedIn.

Google Ads Image Requirements – Sizes and Specs

When choosing to advertise on the Google Display Network (GDN), you are given a variety of sizes to work with. Designing a beautiful display ad won’t mean much if the required dimensions are not properly designed to! That’s why I am going to give you a quick cheat sheet to reference when creating image ads. (*denotes the ‘top performing ad sizes’ as described by Google) File types supported: GIF, JPG, PNG, and HTML 5 Max File Size: 150KB Animated Ads: Even with the introduction of responsive display ads, image ads are still extremely important to be tested. It is actually common for well-designed image ads to actually outperform their responsive counterparts. Additionally, with image ads you are able to decide how the entire space will be used, as opposed to allowing Google to string together the pieces for you with responsive ads. With that idea, more controlled tests of imagery or ad copy can be conducted. Admittedly, the entire process of individually designing each image ad will be much slower than throwing various elements into responsive ads to let Google decide – but well worth the investment if your KPIs are improving!