Google Discovery Ads

For years, Google Search Ads have been helping business owners reach out to customers and increase sales. However, it wasn’t always easy to target people potentially interested in a certain product on other placements, including the Display Network — a group of over 2 million websites, videos, and apps that help reach more than 90% of online users. The Discovery ads have taken care of this, giving merchants more opportunities to advertise their products to broader audiences.

The benefits of Google Discovery Ads are:

  • reaching more users across environments with one ad campaign;
  • increased engagement by providing visually appealing and more relevant ads; 
  • automated bidding options help businesses reach their objectives. 

In this post, you will learn what Discovery ads are, what sets them apart and how you can set up such campaigns.

How do Google Discovery ads work?

Discovery ads offer engaging formats augmented by rich audience targeting. The way such campaigns work is pretty straightforward: advertisers upload a business logo, images (you can create single and multi-image carousel ads), headlines, and descriptions, and Google later creates different combinations of the creatives to identify the best performing one.

Google Discovery ads aim at:

  1. offering internet users personalized ad experience;
  2. inspiring people to take an action.

Discovery campaigns deliver ads on Discover —  the feed of articles and videos on mobile devices. The difference between any other social media feed and Google Discover is that instead of showing content from friends and followed accounts, Google selects the most interesting content on the Internet. To offer a high level of personalization, Google uses machine learning algorithms that analyze how users interact with content and adjusts its delivery accordingly.

You can also choose to display Discovery ads on YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, the Gmail Promotions and Social tab.

Creating a Discovery campaign

  1. Go to your Google Ads account.
  2. Click Campaigns.
  3. Click the + button to select New campaign.
  4. Choose your campaign’s objective.
  5. Choose campaign type: Discovery.
  6. Click Continue.
  7. Set up your targeting — geography and language.
  8. Select audiences.
  9. Choose the bidding strategy and the budget.
  10. Click Save and continue.
  11. Click Save.

Once this step is completed, set up the creatives for your campaign. You can go with either single-image ads or Discovery carousel ads. Make sure to allow some ramp-up time by setting up the budget to drive traffic volume. Finally, use automatic Discovery ads targeting to increase the reach and conversions without overspending.

How is Discover different from other Google offerings?

There’s a big difference between Google Search and Google Discover. People type in terms on the Search page when they look for specific information. Discover, however, doesn’t need searches. It takes a proactive approach by offering people content that might meet their interests.

Discover sorts the content according to the relevance, and not the date when it was published. In their feed, people may find articles published months ago if Google algorithms believe they are relevant.

Unlike ads on Google Search, Discovery ads are not tied to the query. They help you target potential customers even when they are not actively looking for a product or service.

What is a YouTube Discovery ad?

Discovery ads on YouTube — also known as TrueView video Discovery Google ads — are Discovery ads placed on a YouTube page.

There are instream ads and video discovery:

  • Instream ads appear right in the video — either right at the beginning, or somewhere in the video. If a video ad is longer than five seconds, a viewer sees a Skip button that allows them to start watching the main video before the ad finishes.
  • Video Discovery ads appear together with other videos in the Autoplay list in the desktop web browser, or together with other videos on YouTube mobile app’s home page.

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