Google Ads Display

With Google Display ads as your advertising ally, you can reach over 90% of global internet users across more than three million apps and websites. This kind of reach allows you to learn about consumer behavior, identify valuable audiences, and engage with those audiences quickly and often.

What's the value of Google Display ads?

• Powerful intent signals: Google harnesses best-in-class intent signals to place ads against the most relevant content, driving your marketing results.
• Massive scale: Run your ads and connect with your audience through Gmail, YouTube, and millions of other websites.
• Measurable performance: Maximize results with Google Display ads' measurable performance.
• Easy campaign set-up: Once you indicate your marketing objective, Google Display ads will bring you the features and options that are relevant to what you want to accomplish.

There are two campaign types for you to choose from

• Smart Display campaign
• Standard Display campaign

What's a Smart Display campaign?

Smart Display campaigns are a campaign type that uses full automation. It bundles together all the pillars of successful Display campaigns and accesses the best of Google’s machine learning capabilities to optimize and automate nearly all aspects of your Display campaigns. You provide a few inputs: what your ads will say, images you want to use, daily budget, and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) performance targets. Google will mix and match your ads at scale.

Who should run Smart Display campaigns?

• Are new to display advertising and want a fast and highly performing campaign
• Have limited display advertising to remarketing but now want to reach people earlier in the buying process
• Want to attract additional customers beyond your manually targeted campaigns or simplify your existing campaign structure 

What's a Standard Display campaign?

If you’re looking for full control over all aspects of your Display campaign, then a Standard Display campaign is right for you. You can manually select your targeting, bidding, and ad formats.

1. Targeting

When building your first Display campaign, there are three marketing objectives you'll be able to choose from:

• Build awareness: Increase how well people know your brand.
• Influence consideration: Encourage people to explore your products or services.
• Drive action: Get sales or leads by motivating people to take action.

2. Bidding

It’s important to choose a bid strategy that reflects your marketing objectives. There are four main bid strategies you'll be able to choose from when you use Smart Bidding:

• Enhanced CPC: Automatically adjusts your manual bid up or down based on each click’s likelihood to result in a conversion
• Maximize Conversions: Drive as much conversion volume as possible within your budget
• Target CPA: Automatically sets bids to help you increase conversions while reaching your average cost-per-acquisition goal
• Target ROAS: Automatically sets bids to help get as much conversion value as possible at the target return on ad spend you set

3. Ad Formats

Display ads can help you promote your business when people are browsing online, watching YouTube videos, checking Gmail, or using mobile devices and apps.

With Google Display ads, you can take an approach that enables greater efficiency or greater creative control. 

a)  Responsive Display Ads: Responsive Display Ads give you the ability to upload your own assets and create ads that serve in all ad slot sizes, into both native and non-native inventory. Simply upload your assets (images, videos, headlines, logos, and descriptions), and Google will automatically create ads. They're built for performance, reach, and scale.

Key benefits:

• Automation: When you create a Responsive Display Ad by uploading different assets into Google Ads, Google uses a machine learning model to determine the optimal combination of assets for each ad slot based on predictions built from your performance history.
• Reach: Multiple assets can be uploaded per asset type, such as headlines, logos, images, and videos. The ads that Google assembles automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit just about any native or non-native ad slot. 
• Simplicity: By using Responsive Display Ads, you can reduce your overhead for managing ad portfolios within ad groups and campaigns and dedicate more time to performance improvement.

b) Uploaded ads: Uploaded ads offer greater control over the way your ads look and feel. You build your own ads outside of Google Ads and simply upload them to your Display campaign.

Uploaded ads Types:

- Image ads: Created outside of Google Ads (in Google Web Designer, for example), image ads are uploadable as a .zip file into Google Ads. Image ads only run in banner-eligible slots, which has limited scale relative to Responsive Display Ads.

Key Benefit

• Complete creative control: You can develop these ads yourself using templates to decide how best to combine your different images, text, and logos.

- AMPHTML ads: AMPHTML ads enable marketers, publishers, and technology providers to deliver faster, and more secure ad experiences across all platforms by applying the principles of AMP to building and serving ads.

Key Benefits

• Faster ads drive better performance: AMPHTML ads are 6x faster than regular ads on AMP pages, making them more viewable, more effective, and more likely to perform well.
• Lighter ads can lead to better ad experiences: AMPHTML ads are 3x lighter in load and rendering than regular ads which may result in users having a more positive experience with your brand. 
• Safer ads build trust in your brand: AMPHTML ads need validation before they’re served, reducing the risk of malware and building trust in the brands users are engaging with.

Reach Users on Google Display Ads

You can use targeting to direct your campaign’s ads to the people you want to reach most. Simply choose the targeting option that aligns to your campaign goal and Google Display ads will work to get your ad in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.

Three main marketing objectives through her Google Display ads campaigns:

1. Build awareness: When you want to reach a broad audience and maximize your brand exposure, we recommend selecting build awareness as your Display campaign marketing objective. 

Let’s take a look at the Google Display ads targeting options available that will help her build awareness:

• Demographic targeting: Demographic targeting enables you to show ads to users based on a combination of declared and inferred data. You can target based on age, gender, and parental status. 
• Affinity audiences: With Affinity audiences, you can reach TV-like audiences based on a holistic picture of their lifestyles, interests, and passions. Choose from over 100 segments based on online behavior. Google’s best-in-class algorithm distinguishes these users that are truly passionate about a topic rather than those that are merely interested.
• Custom Affinity audiences: If one of the 100+ off-the-shelf Affinity audiences doesn’t meet your needs, create your own with Custom Affinity audiences. This feature allows you to define and target custom-made audiences, giving you substantive reach against niche groups of users.

2. Influence consideration: When you want to engage with users that are actively researching products or services, we recommend selecting influence consideration as your Display campaign marketing objective.

Let’s take a look at the Google Display ads targeting options available that will help her influence consideration:

• In-Market audiences: Reach potential customers while they're actively browsing, researching, or comparing the types of products you sell and are close to a conversion. Connect with those most interested in what you have to offer, using precise segments that classify users based on their demonstrated in-market behavior and purchase intent.
• Custom Intent audiences: If you want to create a tailored audience that isn't covered in one of our In-Market audience segments, Custom Intent is for you! Define and reach people that have the intent to purchase, updated in real-time. Simply enter keywords or URLs that best represent your audience or choose from one of our auto-created audiences.
• Similar Audiences: Similar Audiences finds users that are similar to an original remarketing list or other uploaded compatible list. It finds users that are similar in profile based on their recent browsing and interests around different topics.

3. Drive action: When you want to re-engage with users that have already shown interest in your brand, we recommend selecting drive action as your Display campaign marketing objective.

Let’s take a look at the Google Display ads targeting options available that will help her drive action:

• Remarketing: Remarketing lets you show ads to the people who demonstrated their interest in what you offer with their visit to your website or app. It’s how you reconnect with great prospects as they browse the millions of websites and apps available on the network.
• Standard remarketing: Show ads to your past visitors as they browse network websites and use network apps. Communicate with people who've previously visited key pages on your website across screens, giving you a powerful new way to match the right user with the right message.
• Dynamic remarketing: Work to boost your results with dynamic remarketing, which takes remarketing to the next level with ads that include products or services that people viewed on your website. Create dynamically generated display ads with product data pulled from a pre-uploaded feed. You can achieve great performance showing to users products they have seen on your website, with low effort in campaign, ads, and remarketing lists creation.

What's automated bidding?

Bidding is a key success factor for online marketing, and the bid strategy you choose directly influences how your campaigns perform and how visible your ads are in the unique moments that are important to your business. Google Ads offers several bid strategies that are tailored to your marketing goals and different types of campaigns. Depending on your focus, you can determine which strategy is best for you.

Benefits of Google Ads automated bidding

• Machine learning
• Time saved
• Auction-time bidding
• Depth of signals used and cross analysis

Automated Bidding strategy

It’s important to choose a bidding strategy that reflects your marketing goals. Google Ads offers several bid strategies to choose from. Which strategy you choose depends on which networks your campaign is targeting and whether you want to focus on improving clicks, visibility, conversion, and so on.

1. Awareness-based bidding strategies: You should choose this bid strategy if you want to make sure that your ad is visible for certain queries and even at certain locations on the page.

2. Consideration-focused bidding strategies: You should choose this bid strategy if you want to drive as many clicks as possible within a set level of spend.

3. Conversion-focused bidding strategies: Choose one of these bid strategies if you're tracking actions post-click, valuing conversions equally, and looking to maximize the number of conversions. 

4. Revenue-focused bidding strategies: Choose this bid strategy if you’re tracking the revenue or value associated with your conversions and want to maximize it at a specific return on ad spend target. 

They’re a good fit if you’re tracking conversion value and have campaigns that have at least 50 conversions in the past 30 days for Search and at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days for Display.

Performance Planner

Performance Planner is a new forecasting tool that uses machine learning to reveal the possibilities for your Google Ads campaigns. With this tool, you can explore forecasts for your upcoming monthly, quarterly, and annual budgets for current campaigns, while also helping to improve your return on investment.

How does Performance Planner forecast campaign performance?

Performance Planner uses a combination of account history and machine learning to power forecasts. In Google Ads tools, forecasts must meet a certain level of accuracy. As a result, the confidence interval of these forecasts is likely greater than that of other available forecast tools.

1. Forecasting: Google Search ad auctions — made up of billions of searches per week — powers our forecast engine.

2. Simulation: Our forecast engine simulates relevant ad auctions with query level variables, including seasonality, clickthrough rate, competitors, landing page, and time of day.

3. Machine learning: We use machine learning to fine tune forecasts and achieve a higher level of accuracy.

4. Validation: We perform forward and backward measurements of accuracy for thousands of campaign samples — across one, seven, 30, and 90 day periods — to ensure we’re making valid recommendations.

What changes will Performance Planner recommend?

1. Search Manual cost-per-click (CPC) or Enhanced CPC campaigns: Recommended average daily budget and campaign bid scaling (1.5 scaling means + 50% bid scaling)

2. Search Maximize Clicks or Maximize Conversions campaigns: Recommended average daily budget

3. Search Target CPA or Target return on ad spend (ROAS) campaigns: Recommended average daily budget, Campaign-level Target CPA, or Campaign-level Target ROAS

Google Ads Apps

App campaigns are an automated ad type in Google Ads designed to help advertisers drive app installs and in-app conversions across all of Google’s inventory.

What are the key benefits?

1. Reach: Reach is a key feature of all Google advertising solutions. With Google App campaigns, it’s easy to promote your app across exclusive inventory such as Google Search, Play, YouTube, Discover and over 3 million sites and apps in our network. Google App campaigns have delivered more than 17 billion app installs, and Google is now the #1 network for app installs, according to AppsFlyer.

2. Relevance: Today, we can deliver relevant ads to users based on more inputs than ever before. In addition to traditional signals like age and gender, we can now include signals like app session duration, app settings, search queries, and location. With over 300 million possible signal combinations, Google App campaigns do the heavy lifting for you, delivering the right ad to the right user.

3. Simplicity: Google App campaigns simplify ad creation. Content from your Google Play and Apple App Store listings is pulled to design a variety of ad formats. All you need to do is add a few lines of text. The system then tests combinations to create ads that work best, at the right time. Data-driven systems realize your campaign goals at scale, in real time, with minimal input, which means no more time-consuming manual test-and-iterate period.

Implement conversion tracking in 3 steps

Step 1: Pick an analytics tool to track conversions

• Google Analytics for Firebase SDK
• App attribution partners
• Codeless tracking with Google Play

Step 2: Link your analytics provider with your Google Ads account
Step 3: Import your data to Google Ads

How to start a new campaign

Step 1: Sign into Google Ads.
Step 2: Navigate to the vertical menu on the left and select Campaigns.
Step 3: Select the plus button, then select New campaign from the dropdown.
Step 4: Select your campaign goal. Nadia selects App promotion.
Step 5: Select the campaign subtype. There are three options for campaign subtype: App installs, App engagement, and App pre-registration. Selects App installs.
Step 6: Select the mobile app's platform.
Step 7: Search for your app in the app search field and select it from the results dropdown.
Step 8: Select Continue.

Additional campaign subtypes:

• App engagement helps users rediscover your app by engaging them with relevant ads across Google's properties. Improve customer retention and long-term revenue for an app by increasing active users, generating sales, and reducing churn.
• App pre-registration helps drive awareness and build anticipation for apps and games prior to launch. Capture early consumer interest to accelerate launch performance. 

Note: These campaign subtypes may not be available for all advertisers. Speak with your Google account representative to learn more.

How to select campaign settings

After the initial setup page, there are some campaign-level settings (location, languages, and budget) that look similar to what she's done in other Google Ads campaigns.

Step 1: Name your campaign.

Step 2: Set location targeting. Nadia sets location targeting to United States and Canada.

Note: Targeting locations more granularly than country-level is not recommended, as the system works best when working from the largest dataset possible.

Step 3: Target all the languages that your app supports.

Note: Users will only see your ads in the language in which the campaign was created.

Step 4: Select your currency and enter your budget.

Understand your bidding settings

1. Focus on install volume: Focusing on install volume means that the campaign will optimize for as many installs as possible. 

Within that focus, there are two user groups to target: 

• All users:  Selecting All users will optimize the bidding on this campaign toward getting the most possible installs of your app.

Bid strategy: With this selection, a campaign will optimize toward a target cost-per-install (tCPI). This means that the system will use the outcome of past auctions to predict the likelihood of an install and adjust bids accordingly, with the intent to acquire users at your tCPI.

• Users likely to perform an in-app action: Selecting Users likely to perform a specific in-app action will optimize for high install volume among users likely to perform a designated in-app action. The overall volume of installs with this selection may be lower as compared with other bidding strategies. For these users, you must select the one action that's most important from the list of in-app actions you defined when implementing conversion tracking.

Bid strategy: The campaign will optimize toward tCPI, focusing on installs that have a higher probability of the selected in-app event.

2. Focus on in-app actions: By selecting in-app actions as the focus of your campaign, you want to get users who install the app and are likely to perform the in-app actions of your choice. Upon selecting in-app actions, you'll automatically be asked, “Which actions are most important to you?" You can then pick an event from the list of conversion events you defined in your analytics tracking tool.

Bid strategy: The campaign will optimize toward a tCPA. The system will use selected in-app event outcomes of past auctions to predict the likelihood of the number of in-app events to occur and adjust bids accordingly, with the intent to acquire users completing that event at your tCPA.

How to finalize your bidding settings

Step 1: Choose a focus for your campaign. Nadia wants the most possible installs of her app, so she chooses to focus her campaign on Install volume across All users.

.

Step 2: Your bidding strategy will be automatically selected based on your campaign focus and target users.

Enter an amount for your bid. If you're already running another campaign with tCPI or tCPA, use those as a starting bid. Otherwise, think about how much the specific conversion event is worth to your business.

Step 3: Now that you've set a bid, go back to make sure your budget is high enough.

Step 4: Set the campaign's start and end dates, then select Save and Continue.

Key takeaways

• Google App campaigns can drive either installs or engagement.   
• When creating an App campaign for installs, you can chose to optimize based on install volume or in-app actions.  
• If you already have a target CPI or CPA, use that as a starting bid for your campaign.
• Set a daily campaign budget that's at least 50x your tCPI or 10x your tCPA.  

Ad group

For accurate targeting, assets are organized in ad groups around a specific theme, audience, or message. Ad creatives are only created from combinations of assets within an ad group. Here are some guidelines:

• At least one ad group is required for each campaign. 
• It's strongly recommended to have at least one evergreen ad group that continues to run while you explore different themes with other ad groups. 
• Additional ad groups may be created after all campaign settings are complete. 
• Remember that all ad groups in a campaign will target the same user location and language, as those settings are selected at the campaign level.

Note: Ad groups are groups of ads or ad assets that share common themes.

Ad assets

Ad assets are individual elements such as lines of text, individual images, or videos that are combined automatically in an App campaign to create ads.

One of the key ways that machine learning powers app campaigns is by using individually-added assets to auto-generate ads.

Uploading a diverse mix of assets allows the system to learn and improve performance. Assets can be added into Google Ads manually by advertisers or auto-generated from content within the app’s Google Play and Apple App Store listings.

Ad assets are used in different combinations to build ads and match them with users who meet the campaign goal you selected. If you upload many diverse assets, your ads will serve across more inventory and reach more users.

Types of assets:

1. Text

What is it: Text assets are short lines of text about your app that appear in ads across Google Search, Play, and YouTube, and in the more than three million sites and apps in our network. There are two types of text lines in App campaigns: headlines and description lines.

Headlines: Headlines are not app titles, but text that highlights the key feature of the app. Headlines should be standalone sentences that end with punctuation. To learn more, check out our advertising policies.

Max count:  Each ad group can have two to five headlines, with up to 30 characters in each.

Description lines: Description lines are longer text, with more in-depth detail about your app. Description text ideas should educate, inform, avoid generic language, and take full advantage of character lengths.

Max count: Each ad group may have one to five description lines, with up to 90 characters in each.

2. Image

What is it: Image assets are images used in ads to represent your app on over three million sites and apps in our network.

Max count: Each ad group can have up to 20 images.

Details:

• Images can be .jpg or .png, with a maximum size of 150KB.
• Image assets can be either landscape (1.91:1) or square (1:1).

3. Video

What is it: Video assets are video clips that appear in ads across YouTube and over three million sites and apps in our network.

Max count: Each ad group can have up to 20 videos.

Details:

• Videos must be hosted on YouTube.
• Orientation can be landscape, portrait, or square.
• Videos of varying length and aspect ratios will reach users in different formats. 
• If no video is uploaded, Google Ads may use assets from your app store listing to make a video ad for your campaign.

4. HTML5

What is it: HTML5 assets are snippets of code used to create interactive ads. The HTML5 ad is typically a full screen ad, or interstitial, and may be paired with other assets from your app store listing page to create ads on over three million sites and apps in our network. Consider uploading the maximum number of other asset types before building for HTML5.

Max count: Each ad group may have up to 20 HTML5 assets.

Details:

• Use the HTML5 Validator tool to validate HTML5 assets before uploading.
• HTML5 sizes currently accepted include:
• 300x250 (fixed size)
• 320x50 (fixed size)
• 480x320 (landscape interstitial, variable size)
• 320x480 (portrait interstitial, variable size)

The importance of asset coverage and quality

1. Asset coverage: Having assets of all types and sizes helps increase ad coverage, meaning your ads have a better chance of showing up across the broad inventory of Google’s properties.

Asset variety allows machine learning to optimize for user preferences, picking the right ad for the right user.

2. Asset quality: Of course, ad coverage and variety are only effective if the creatives themselves are strong. Provide high-quality assets so that your ads resonate with your audience. If you need help, Google’s directory of preferred creative partners provide professional asset development services.

3. Achieve excellence with your creative assets:

a) Text assets: 

• Use the maximum number of allowed headlines and descriptions
• Empower users to take action
• Experiment with variety
• Match your text to its ad group

b) Image assets: 

• Upload high-quality images
• Keep it simple
• Use text minimally and selectively
• Provide many image assets of different ratios

c) Video assets: 

• Focus on the app experience
• Provide video assets of different ratios and durations
• Customize videos for mobile experience
• Use clear, crisp, and engaging audio

d) HTML5 assets:

• Make it short, engaging and accurate
• Use high-quality images to create HTML5 assets in different aspect ratios
• Provide clear instructions on how to interact with the ad
• Include persistent call-to-action

Understand Your App Campaign Results

Focus 1: Understand the importance of view-through conversions: App campaign reporting is similar to that of other Google Ad campaigns, but there’s one specific metric that deserves a closer look: view-through conversions, or VTCs.

What are they?

• A VTC occurs when a user sees an ad and doesn’t click on it, but completes a conversion on the advertiser’s app within 24 hours.
• VTCs are measured for all ad formats except Search. They are reported separately from click-through conversions.

Where are they?

• “View-through conversions” isn’t a default reporting column in Google Ads. To see view-through conversions in its own column, start in the campaign performance report and go to Columns at the top right. Select Conversions, check the View-through conversions box, and select Apply.
• If you’re using an app attribution partner, ask about how to enable VTC reporting.

Focus 2: Assign value to events : Find out which customers are the most valuable to your business by assigning different values to specific events.

a) Associate values with individual events: Assign a value to each in-app event and process the data in your analytics platform to help you understand how users generate value within your app. Different events have different values — some purchases are worth more than others, and certain actions, like referring a friend, are valuable even if they don't immediately generate revenue.

b) Understand lifetime value (LTV): Not all customers bring equal value to your business. Consider two users who each make a $5 purchase one day after downloading your app. They might look the same to you if you're using a seven-day lookback window. But what if the first user never makes another purchase, while the second user makes a new purchase every week? This is a difference you'll want to be able to measure.

Focus 3: Measure across app and web: Users want what they want, when they want it — and they move across apps and web to find it. So building a seamless user experience is key to customer retention and business growth. The ability to measure user behavior cross-platform is just as critical. Unfortunately, measuring across app and web remains challenging for a few reasons:

• Users often have multiple touchpoints across multiple channels prior to conversion. 
• Advertisers often have limited insight into user journeys across platforms because app and web engagement are commonly measured by different teams, making them difficult to unify.
• Web attribution is fairly advanced, while app attribution is mostly still “last click.” 

Google offers two solutions to help bridge the measurement gap between app and web: (1) deep linking and (2) App + Web properties in Google Analytics.

Solution 1: Deep linking: Send your most valuable users directly to your app when they click an ad in their browser.

With deep linking, when a user who already has your app installed clicks on your Search, Display, or Shopping ad on their device, they'll be taken directly to the relevant page in your mobile app. 

Solution 2: App + Web properties in Google Analytics: App + Web is a new property type in Google Analytics that allows advertisers to measure across their apps and websites. By measuring app and website engagement in one place, you'll be able to explore cross-platform user insights, measure the impact of ad campaigns across app and web, and measure app-to-web conversions.

Optimize the App Experience

1. Improve your app store listing: Create a compelling first time user experience that begins in the app store, before the download. Make sure your app title, description, icon, feature graphic, screenshots, and video provide a clear and accurate representation of your app experience.

2. Improve your app: The visibility of your app in the app store is also impacted by the quality of the app itself. In fact, the majority of positive, five-star reviews specifically praise app speed, design, and usability.

3. Technical performance:

1. Speak with your app developer team about their plans for improving technical performance. 
2. Smaller app file sizes correlate with higher install conversion rates, particularly in emerging markets.

4. User experience

Expand App Reach Across Markets

Step 1: Choose the right markets
Step 2: Localize your app
Step 3: Test, launch, and measure to scale