What are Google Discovery Ads?

Google Discovery Ads

Google Discovery ads are visually rich ads that appear on the YouTube app, the Google app, and the Gmail app. They can display as a single image or a carousel of images, helping advertisers get products and services discovered by potential audiences.

This ad type leverages machine learning to better focus on a user’s intent, helping Google serve your ad at the best moment based on user signals.

What are the Benefits of Google Discovery Ads?

Visually Compelling Advertising

According to Google, 76 percent of consumers love making surprise discoveries when they’re shopping or browsing. Google Discovery Ads are visually appealing, highly engaging ads that allow your ideal target audience to discover your digital content, brand, and digital products in this way.

Automated Bidding

Google Discovery Ads takes the guesswork out of choosing an ideal bid by automating it for you via target CPAs and maximized conversion bidding. Instead of taking a shot and hoping for the best, Google works with you to optimize your campaign for you.

Incredible Consistency

Did you know that an astonishing 85 percent of consumers will act on a compelling discovery within 24 hours? That’s because Google Discovery Ads are specially designed and optimized to reach the correct people right when they’re ready to buy, engage, or otherwise act. This makes for incredibly consistent advertising and steady results.

More Efficient Campaigns

A single Google Discovery campaign has the potential to reach several billion different people every month. Not only do Google Discovery Ads appear in each user’s discovery feed, but they show up across other massively popular Google interfaces, as well, like Gmail and YouTube.

What’s Important to Know About Google Discovery Ads?

While this new ad type presents marketers with yet another exciting tool, it also comes with a few differentiating qualities that are important to note:

• Discovery ads are targeted by audiences, not keywords. Google gives you the opportunity to choose which audiences you want, including remarketing, detailed demographics, in-market audiences, life events, and affinity and custom intent.
• Google Discovery ads have limited campaign settings. You cannot adjust manual bid strategies, contextual targeting, placement targeting, device targeting, ad rotation, frequency capping, or delivery method.
• The Discover feed in the Google App is unavailable to consumers in Germany, Australia, and France. So, if you plan to target those countries, your ads will be limited to the YouTube home feed and the Gmail feed.

How to Create Google Discovery Ads?

Step 1: Set up a Google Discover ad campaign.

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click ‘Campaigns’ located on the left of the page menu.
3. Click the ‘+’ button, then select ‘New campaign.’
4. Choose your marketing objective.
5. Click on the ‘Discovery campaign’ type.
6. Select ‘Continue.’
7. Pick your geographic and language targeting for this campaign.
8. Select your audiences.
   1. You can choose between customer intent, your data (i.e. remarketing list), and in-market audiences.
9. Set your bidding strategy and average daily budget.
10. Click ‘Save and continue.’
11. Click ‘Save.’

Step 2: Upload your creative assets.

There are two formats available for Discovery marketing campaigns: single-image ads and multi-image carousel ads.

For this campaign, you must upload multiple versions of some assets, as Google will create different combinations to optimize your marketing campaigns, such as:

• Headlines – You must upload between three to five headlines up to 40 characters each.
• Description – You can have anywhere from one to five descriptions up to 90 characters.
• Business name, CTA, and Final URL – You can only have one of each.
• Images – You must have at least one landscape image, one square image, and a square logo, with a maximum file size of 5MB.

Step 3: Undergo the “Learning” period.

Once your campaign goes live, you must allow two weeks for Google Ads to optimize your bids.

During this time frame, you may see the label “Learning” next to your bid strategy status. This is an indication that you should avoid making any bidding changes and assess once that time expires.