Promote your brand with Discovery campaigns on Google

Google Ads introduced Discovery ads in 2019, so that advertisers can optimize the money from their campaigns, obtaining results in the highest part of the conversion funnel.

This is how the search engine aims to compete with the Facebook ad platform, where the cost per conversion is increasing in these early stages of the conversion funnel.

With the demise of Google+, the company's social network, many media buyers wondered if the search engine had given up competing with discovery ads. However, with the appearance of Google Discovery it has become clear that they are going to compete in this area and that it is also not necessary to have a social network to do so.

What are Discovery Ads?

This type of ad runs in the home section of Google Discovery, which is located on the home page of Google.com and on the home page of your mobile device application. These ads can also be found on the YouTube home page and in the Gmail mailbox.

The appearance and format of your ads change depending on where they are displayed. However, the main objective of these pieces is to deliver visually compelling experiences, which contributes to getting more clicks from users.

For many years advertisers have relied on Google to segment audiences, based on searches and user intentions, leaving audience targeting by interest to social networks. However, Discovery ads detect the interests of audiences based on user navigation through the Google universe. In this way, the platform creates groups with behavior patterns similar to those existing in Display campaigns.

How do you change the campaign settings?

Unlike the other types of Google campaigns, Discovery campaigns do not have such refined control of variables. For example, the following settings are not available to advertisers:

Manual bid strategies

Method of delivery

Device targeting

Location targeting (including exclusions)

Frequency limiting

Ad rotation

Contextual segmentation

While many advertisers may not be comfortable with the platform handling so many variables automatically, Google specifies that there are automatically applied exclusions so that ads are not displayed on sites with violent content and profanity.

In the same way, the Google ad platform automatically assembles the ads according to the type of location in which they are going to be displayed, based on the parameters that the advertiser previously configured.

Like the Universal ads settings for apps and Dynamic Search ads, this type of campaign has an automatic system, which allows Google to run the ads in the way it thinks is most convenient.

To keep in mind

• This level of automation in campaign settings may not be what many advertisers prefer. However, some users are getting good results from using these types of ads.

• So that you can get a better picture of your audience, I recommend that you check the performance of your ads by device type, as there are cases in which conversions vary drastically depending on where they are displayed.

• In the same way, I recommend that you pay special attention to the creativity of your pieces, since a large part of the performance of your ads depends on them. For that, I recommend that you replicate the pieces that had the best interaction on your social networks.

I hope you can get the most out of this type of ads, so I recommend that you compare the performance of this platform compared to Facebook or other similar ones.