Discovery Ads are a powerful tool for helping advertisers promote the right products to the right people at the right time as they scroll through their favorite content on YouTube, Google Discover, and Gmail on their mobile phones. This can help drive increased brand exposure and purchases from people who might not have been aware of your brand and products.
According to Google, early Discovery Ad testing showed that including product feeds achieved up to 45% more conversions at a similar cost per acquisition.
If you have a Google Merchant Center product feed in place, you can utilize that same data in your Google Discovery Ads campaigns.
Benefits of Discovery Ads
- Efficiency: Take advantage of Google machine learning to anticipate a user’s interests and intent to automatically show relevant products, helping to meet your conversion, cost per acquisition, or return on ad spend goals.
- Ease: Rather than creating individual ads for each of your items, simply connect your Google Discovery campaign to your existing Google Merchant Center feed. The images and product details in the feed will then be used as a large set of creatives for ads that are automatically surfaced to potential customers. As they explore other content, these potential customers can click on a product image to immediately go to the product’s landing page for additional information and to make a purchase.
- Specific Product Targeting: Using predefined product group filters helps to create more targeted Discovery Ads, increasing the level of relevance to your audiences.
It is important to note that you will need to set up a new Google Discovery campaign to link to your Google Merchant Center feed. Adding a Google Merchant Center feed to an existing Discovery campaign is not currently supported.
Discovery Ads Campaign Setup Best Practices
There are two campaign options for Google Discovery Ads with product feeds: remarketing campaigns and prospecting campaigns.
- Remarketing Campaigns: Primary focus on lower-funnel conversion goals like sales.
Audiences to use: Customer Match and Remarketing Lists can both help you stay out in front of potential customers already familiar with your products during the time of their decision-making process in their customer journey.
- Prospecting Campaigns: Increased focus across broader types of engagement, brand awareness, generating website traffic, and sales.
Audiences to use: Custom segments and In-Market audiences are both recommended for this type of approach. Optimized targeting can also be enabled to help find more potential new audiences. It’s important to note that you’ll want to exclude previously engaged customers who have already visited the website.
It is strongly recommended to include as many products as possible that could be a relevant match for your selected audiences to take full advantage of the opportunity.
Best Practices for Discovery Ads Creatives
Assets for Discovery Ads with product feeds are populated primarily from your Google Merchant Center catalog. Your ad-level headline and descriptions would be used to more broadly represent your general overall offering. There is also an opportunity to create an optional Intro Card. The card consists of a static image — supplied in each aspect ratio (16:9, 1:1, and 4:5) for the most complete coverage — along with a landing page URL. When you include an Intro Card, it may appear as an alternative or fallback when the product details cannot be shown.   Â
Now that Discovery Ads allow for this additional integration with your product feed data, there is no better time to consider working them into your Google Ads advertising plan. Whether utilizing Discovery Ads with product fee data for remarketing, prospecting, or both, take advantage of this effective method to further expand your brand exposure, reach new customers, increase website engagement, and maximize your Google Ads results.
