4 Discovery Ads Strategies To Grow Your Business

Native advertising has been around for a very long time, the ability to set display ads on sites across the internet being a key marketing strategy for many businesses, big and small.

However, tracking the performance and evaluating the data from older native ads took quite a lot of time and effort. This took a turn for the better a few years ago when Google transformed the display world. The launch of Discovery ads revolutionised the game.

You do not need to be a marketing guru to effectively incorporate discovery ads into your marketing plan. It’s based on intent signals from consumers’ recent activity. It works in a similar way to in-market audiences, making it a lot more simple to manage and alter.

July of 2021 is going to be the official end of standalone Gmail campaigns, as Google merges the former with current discovery ads. This means that you must begin to transition towards this model, and here are some key strategies to integrate into your new, fresh, discovery campaigns.

1. The Best Ad Placements

When you think about the objectives of your display ads push, where the creatives will be located is going to be near, if not top of your list. You always want to be in front of the right people, at the right time. However, this is amplified when you add the right website into the equation.

Say you sell golf equipment, it’s going to be vital to get your ads in front of golf enthusiasts, or people who have recently searched for golf clubs. If they find your ads on websites that are completely irrelevant though, it seriously affects the interaction chance.

Discovery ads are Google’s baby, meaning they can only be found in top Google feeds. The two big ones, YouTube and Gmail, are seen by hundreds of millions of users worldwide, every day. Now think, going back to the golfing example, if your creatives were seen adjacent to a video on YouTube of a golfing video. This is going to skyrocket prospective engagement.

2. Being Seen By The Right People

Discovery ads go hand in hand with search, video, and display campaigns, which is ideal when you are fine-tuning the targeting for your new campaign.

It is highly recommended to have some well-performing campaigns formerly mentioned running first, with audience targeting in place. A remarketing list is especially good, targeting people who have previously visited your site is always a step in the right direction. However, other key audiences like in-market and custom intent can be critical in finding the right eyes for your business.

Remember to keep adding to your audiences with new data and top-performing keywords. There will always be new prospects to add to your audience list and the addition of these extra keywords will help keep you on top.

3. Correctly Budgeting and Altering

Discovery ads have a massive scope, much more than that of purely Gmail. Appearing on YouTube and other Discovery channels will have a huge boost on the awareness of your business. However, this will require a larger budget than a normal Gmail ads campaign would require.

We suggest using at least double the budget for the new discovery campaign to help reach these extra sites, as well as Gmail, to ensure your reach is at its maximum for what you are budgeting.

Once you have the campaign set up with the beautiful artwork, targeting, and budget in place, don’t feel like you need to come back to it every day to try and make any changes to the campaign. Monitor performance as much as you want, but try not to make any changes for the first fortnight as you wait for Google’s machine learning algorithms to place your ads in the ideal spots and get the best possible return for your campaign.

4. New Ways To Display

It won’t be breaking news for you to know, mobile searches are quickly overtaking the volume of computer searches. Everywhere you go, everyone you see, it feels like they are all looking down at their smartphones. With this being the case, you need to make sure that your display ads aren’t solely limited to single images appearing on Gmail, YouTube, and the like.

Carousel or gallery ads are a brilliant, unique alternative to just having one image for people to see. For example, someone could be searching for a restaurant near them. Would they rather see one display ad showing a nice looking meal or a gallery of up to 8 images highlighting multiple signature dishes? Whatever your area of business, if you can stunningly show off the key areas and market them effectively, you are going to get far more engagement.

If you have an online shop, Showcase Shopping ads will be a perfect integration to your campaign, similar as they have been twinned with the discovery feeds. These ads include one larger primary image which can be viewed with a link through to your shop, but also includes 3 or 4 smaller images that equally direct users through to your website. A perfect campaign idea if you have a sale on selected items, if you have a range of products, or just highlighting what you think will be the most visually appealing.

Conclusion

It might be a bit of a tedious job for some, having to switch their Gmail campaigns to discovery. The time, however, will be more than worth it once the switch is made and you are able to get your ads in more places, more effectively, with better tracking, performance, and clarity.

So long as you ensure all of the strategies are implemented properly, you will soon see higher engagement, prospects, and eventually sales. There are almost 3 billion people that you can reach through these feeds, so you can guarantee that discovery campaigns are here to stay, and will only improve over time.

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