This past May Google announced massive changes at their annual Google Marketing Live event. If you missed it, you missed a lot. 

And if you don’t know what this event is about, Google’s marketing live event celebrates marketers and announces big changes in the advertising industry.

This year as well, tons of new features and tools were introduced to help marketers find potential customers.

Among these announcements, the most exciting one was Discovery Ads to make products easily visible to audiences.

Discovery Ads allow marketers to advertise their products to a targeted audience on Google’s Discover feed (for the first time). These ads will also be visible prominently in Gmail and Youtube.

The best part is, audiences receive these prominent ads even before they go searching.

Google claims, 85% of viewers take action within 24 hours of discovering the ads. These ads significantly impact the purchase journey of a marketer’s targeted customer. 

Though this looks like a product promotion play at first but automation services of Google provide high rates of direct ROI. This discovery ads campaign drives in convertible traffic inexpensively (an average CPA of $12.19).

Google also announced the discovery ads will now be globally available to all advertisers.

In this blog, I will share everything you need to know about discovery ads. But before I start, you probably have already heard or used Google’s Discover feed. This is how it looks:

If you have used the Google app in your mobile device, you are accustomed to this image.

What are Google Discovery Ads?

Google’s newest innovation, the discovery ads help marketers reach their products to high-value customers. This campaign is unique in itself for its algorithm. Unlike the standard feed, Discover ads make use of robust machine learning to learn users’ search journey. The campaign streamlines the testing and optimization to offer relevant content. It evolves with the users for more targeted marketing across discover feed, Gmail, and YouTube.

Here, have a look:

Why is this innovation significant?

With time, people’s daily internet interactions are changing. Back in the day, the internet was more of like a digital yellow page. Still is, but people expect more from their online journey. Thus, came this innovation, Google Discovery Ads. Instead of providing answers or suggestions, Google now offers audiences directly what they are looking for.

Thus, the more an audience interacts with the Discover feature, the easier it gets for Google to study the intent and offer targeted items.

The Google Discovery Ads formats –

The Google Ads campaign offers two kinds of Ads format – standard single image Discovery Ads and the Discovery Carousel Ads.

The Standard ads have its unique aspects:

• The URL: This is the link to which the ads direct the audiences on clicking. To do this effectively, I recommend marketers to use precise product links and not homepages. Direct product links have the relevant information the visitor is expecting. Linking the homepage instead reduces the chances of conversion.
• The Images: The goal is to use the ads to stop viewers mid-scrolling and compel them to click through. This isn’t a place to compete with top-notch write-ups. Creating visual contrast using bold colored high-quality images allows marketers to stay ahead.

Google helps marketers in this process. You can upload about 15 images relevant to the product and give a test run to find the ones that might increase reach. You can upload your images, or from Shutterstock or whichever you deem fit.

• Headline: The discovery ads feature the headline in the first line of the ads in bold. It allows marketers to provide 5 headlines within 40 characters each.
• Description: This area is to leave a catchy message for an opportunity to attract the audiences. Once again, 5 descriptions within 90 characters each.
• Business Name: The true business name should be used. This will show up alongside the ads.
• CTA button:  This is optional where one can add ‘Buy Now’ or alike to the ads. However, Google can itself test and optimize your ads to generate CTAs.

The Discovery Carousel Ads – is very similar to the conventional discovery ads. Only the viewer can scroll through the images provided by the marketer. The carousel ads allow marketers to display 2 to 10 images that are displayed in proper order.

Note that Google only allows square or landscape images (1.91:1 aspect ratio). Marketers cannot mix both the orientation in the same ads.

How to create Discovery Ads?

Creating Discovery Ads is very simple, especially if you are accustomed to the Google Ads Interface.

If your business has no ads at all, you can start today by visiting https://ads.google.com/ and signing in with your business account.

Once created an ads account, these steps are to be followed –

• On the left side, go to the page menu and click Campaigns.
• Click on the plus ‘+’ button and select the New Campaign.
• There are objectives to choose from – Leads, Sales, Traffic, No goal, and more.

• Select the campaign type Discovery.

• Click on continue. Name your campaign. Select the geographic location and language targeting.
• Select your audiences. (I will explain discovery campaign targeting shortly).
• Select the bidding strategy and the average daily budget.
• There are additional settings if you wish to keep your ads for a particular period or particular hours of the day.
• Click Save and Continue to let your ads go live!

The steps are simple but a newcomer might require proper explanation.

Google Discovery Ads Targeting

As an SEO freelancer, I always talk about targeted keywords and their vitality for gaining organic traffic. In almost every ad campaign targeted keywords play an essential role, only not in Discovery Ads.

Here, marketers can choose which audiences they wish their ads to reach by including the following–

• Remarketing: This allows marketers to target past visitors. The re-engagement can be based on various interactions – visitors on a particular page, shopping cart abandoners, previous customers. This is to reach audiences already familiar with the brand.
• Detailed Demographic: Targeting discovery ads on a detailed persona. To target audiences by filtering age, gender, education, status, etc.
• In–Market Audience: This is to reach users who have recently started searching for the product. They are already in the sales funnel and are likely to make a purchase.
• Life Events: to target audiences who reached or about to reach a milestone. Like graduating, or marrying or taking any big step.
• Affinity: To reach users based on their interests or what they have browsed in the past.

Discovery Ads Bidding and Budget

Google Discovery Ads are backed by machine learning and offer smart Bidding strategies. There are mainly two strategies to choose from –

Target Cost Per Action: Here Google focuses on driving conversion at a specific CPA. I recommend you opt for this strategy if your budget’s 10X your target CPA.

Maximize Conversion: Here Google focuses on driving in most of the conversion at a low CPA. This one’s the best for advertisers with a smaller budget.

Beyond Discover Feed

Google discovery ads are not just limited to the discovery feed. The ads also show up on the YouTube home page and Gmail’s social and promotions tab.

The idea behind targeting these platforms is to help people visiting there to gather information or discover. So, discovering relevant items directly could pan out well. It would be interesting to find out how this works out, carving a new channel in the future of marketing.

Wrapping up, I believe this campaign looks promising for big to small marketers. These ads offer a unique way of engaging visitors and lead them to conversion.

How can I help you? I am an SEO freelancer and a Digital Marketing expert. I can create and optimize your ads campaign to reach audiences smoothly. And to know more about Google discovery ads, feel free to get in touch.