How to create Discovery Ads?

Are you already using display ads and wondering how else you can increase the reach of your campaigns?”

With help comes Discovery Ads and a brief guide on how to create and optimize them to be most effective in achieving your marketing goals. 

What are Discovery campaigns?”

This is one type of ad in Google Ads that allows you to present your ad on a very wide scale in an attractive way. Google determines that you can reach up to 3 billion customers across a variety of content sources to develop and meet your performance goals. 

Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? And what is the behind-the-scenes of such an operation? Discovery campaigns leverage a huge audience base and signals about users’ likely intentions to display compelling ads to precisely those users who are closest to learning about your brand and interacting with it. 

Creating Discovery Campaigns

What do you need before you can start creating Discovery ads?

• Advertising components: headlines, ad text, logos and images you want to use. Remember to provide graphic elements of the best possible quality – appropriate logos, as well as sharp and well-exposed photos. It will also be a good idea to use content and images that have so far achieved satisfactory results in your other campaigns. 
• Check that you are properly tracking the actions that cause conversions and that you have enabled tagging for your entire site. 
• Find out the rules for personalized ads.
• Plan your budget so that it is at least 10 times your target CPA.

How to create a Discovery campaign step by step?

1. Log in to your Google Ads account

2. Click on “Campaigns” and then click on the blue plus button to create “New campaign” 

3. Choose the marketing goal that best fits your strategy. You can choose between goals i.e. “Sales“, “Potential customers“, “Site traffic” or create a campaign without a specific goal.

4. Now select the “Discovery” campaign type and one of the subtypes. You have a choice of:

• standard Discovery campaign
• discovery campaign with product data files

After selecting, click “Further“.

5. Select a conversion goal to make the campaign effective and optimize correctly

6. Determine geographic and language targeting

7. Choose a rate-setting strategy that suits you and determine your daily budget. Then click “Further“

8. Choose your audience segments. You have a choice of:

• targeting custom audiences with similar intentions
• targeting based on your data
• targeting to segments in the market

We’ll pause a moment longer here, because you need to remember that your audience lists must meet certain requirements if they are to be used in campaigns. These include:

• On the Google search network: you must accumulate at least 1,000 users on the lists who have been active in the last 30 days.
• On YouTube: you must have accumulated at least 1,000 users on the lists who have been active in the last 30 days.
• Twitter.
• In Gmail: You must accumulate on the lists at least 100 users who have been active in the advertising network in the last 30 days.

How to create advertising in the Discovery Network?

You will have a choice of two types of advertising:

1. Static Discovery advertising

Add a URL, a headline (preferably several, with a maximum of 5), and some ad text (again, you can enter a maximum of 5). Include a maximum of 15 images and a logo. The dimensions of the graphics for Discovery ads do not differ from those of the ad network, but if you need to check the exact sizes, I recommend a page from Google Support: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/12563349?visit_id=638106753940381303-2393806808&rd=1

To the overall components, it’s still worth adding a CTA (i.e., call-to-action text).

2 Carousel Discovery Advertising

Here the advertising process is very similar to the above. This type of advertising is characterized by the fact that 2 to 10 tabs can be created, and in each tab we have the option to add a separate headline and page address. As for headlines and ad text, in each block we can add one headline with a maximum length of 40 characters and one ad text with a maximum length of 90 characters, and we also add the company name. 

Then we add a square graphic, and for each graphic we write the corresponding URL and individual headline. 

How to target Discovery ads?

In addition to choosing a marketing target at the very beginning of creating a campaign, we also have a choice of different ways to target ads to audiences, including:

• demographic targeting (age, gender, parental status, education)
• interest targeting (users are matched according to specific interests in a particular topic, e.g. cycling, cooking, marketing)
• targeting by “market audience” (these are audiences who actively search for something on Google and show a clear willingness to buy certain products, e.g., computer equipment, car, household appliances) 
• targeting due to life events (these are audiences that you can identify based on the example life events given, e.g., people who change jobs, people who got married, graduated from college, recently started a business, etc.)
• remarketing (i.e., using already created remarketing lists collecting users who have visited your site in the past or performed a specific action on it)
• targeting custom audiences – Custom intent and custom affinity audiences (in this case, you can create audience lists yourself, which are based on specific keywords or selected page addresses)

What do you need to remember when creating Discovery ads?

1. After launching your campaign, wait about 2 weeks before making any more big changes. Give the campaign time to learn and optimize rates before you turn its advertising world upside down again 🙂 

2. Add ad extensions to your campaign. Think through which ones will work best for you and prepare, for example, a form extension or a phone extension to make it easier for potential customers to contact you. 

3. Care for high-quality images and review discovery ad requirements to prevent ad rejection in the future. 

4. Use graphic components you already use in other campaigns. Create a unified brand image and ensure that your company, products or services are more likely to register in the minds of your audience. In addition, using existing graphic assets (if those are effective, of course!) will save you time and money.

Effective Discovery Campaign Optimization 

Like any campaign, this one also requires analysis of results, plans for further development and optimization. Below I have three suggestions for you on how you can optimize your Discovery ads:

• Discovery campaigns do not use keywords, but audience groups. It’s a good idea to watch the audience reports of your ads and analyze which groups convert best. Remember, if you want to add new audience groups to watch, check “Watching” and not “Targeting” to avoid unnecessarily narrowing your campaign’s reach.
• Review the Recommendations tab and try to keep your campaigns’ optimization score above 80%. If you are unsure about the recommendations presented, you can always consult your thoughts with your team or digital agency
• Apply ad exclusions. You can exclude groups from your audience that you know won’t be interested in either your products or services. It’s a good idea to analyze your audience segments in terms of, for example, life events or interest in some specific topic. 

When is it worth using Discovery campaigns?

When, after choosing the right marketing target, you want to get a lot of conversions through multimedia ads. Discovery ads will work great for both a sales goal such as buying and increasing awareness and customer acquisition. If you’re looking to stay in touch with customers who are already familiar with your brand and products or services, this type of campaign is also worth considering. In this case, as remarketing, it is Discovery campaigns that can work great, as with their ads they can target users who have already taken advantage of your offer and are eager to interact again.

Test Discovery campaigns and reach new audiences!

We’d be happy to help you create and optimize your Discovery advertising campaigns to increase your brand visibility and generate more conversions. Contact us and let’s talk about your goals!

Let’s talk!

Advertising Discovery Advantages:

1. Effective outreach campaign. 

You can display your ads on the YouTube homepage, in the “Worth Watching” section and on the Discover tabs, as well as on the “Offers” and “Communities” tabs in Gmail. This allows us to reach out to potential customers on a wider scale. We no longer focus only on keywords typed into the search engine, but also reach users who use Google services to search for new fashion trends or watch videos of, for example, handmade tutorials. 

2. Greater engagement of your audience and better relevance of ads.

By using signals that analyze your customers’ behavior, you can display much more relevant ads to them at the right time, when they are most interested in your services or products. 

3. Natively created ads directly in Google system.

You provide the advertising resources, and all the rest is done by learning systems. They combine all these elements and effectively display on different devices, at the right time. 

4. Automatic rate setting 

In Discovery campaigns, you can use strategies such as maximizing the number of conversions, target CPA or target ROAS. You can also always enable optimized targeting, so you can take advantage of Google’s developed algorithms, targeting effective audience acquisition.