Google recently held its annual Google Marketing Live event in San Francisco on 14th May to introduce the latest innovations and developments in Google advertising to marketers around the world. The newly announced ad formats, in particular, should give marketers more opportunities to reach their customers in new and engaging ways.
Discovery Ads
With the introduction of Discovery Ads, Google is taking advantage of the enormous reach of the Discover feed on their app, YouTube, as well as the Social and Promotions Tab of Gmail. Only one single campaign will cover all three platforms, and machine learning will improve the ads automatically to offer the best results possible.
What is needed?
- One URL landing page
- Your logo and at least one landscape image
- Up to five headlines
- Up to five descriptions
Discovery Ads will adapt to the design of each platform to create a seamless experience for the user, while at the same time giving advertisers a whole new range of potential customers. This ad format will be available for the public later this year.
Gallery Ads
According to Prabhakar Raghavan – SVP of Google Ads, one of their goals for the future is to “combine search results with a more interactive visual format”. Google wants to achieve this with its new Gallery Ads.
What is needed?
- Four to eight images
- Up to three headlines for testing
- Up to 70 characters per image
This new ad format will be placed at the very top of the search results and feature a picture gallery for users to swipe through. This means that a potential customer can discover an advertiser’s product range without having to click on a link. Much like Discovery Ads, the new Gallery Ads will be made available later this year, initially rolling out exclusively for mobile. Adaptation for desktop users is being investigated right now.
Deep Linking Capabilities
Companies with mobile apps, rejoice! Google announced new Deep Linking functionalities from Google Ads which lead app users directly to the respective page of the app on their mobile phone when clicking on a link in Search, Display and/or Shopping Ads.
Users will be able to experience products in a much more optimised and personalised way, as they can store all the necessary information like preferences and payment information directly inside the app.
In addition to this, Google will also improve traffic and conversion tracking for apps, helping companies to comprehend their user base and retrace their steps better. Deep linking for apps will be made available for the public in the next couple of weeks.
Bumper Machine
Bumper Ads are the up to six seconds long unskippable ads at the beginning of YouTube. As Google already found out in 2017, these ads can have a significant effect on brand awareness and ad recall. Now, Google offers a new tool, the Bumper Machine, to help advertisers create these small but powerful ads.
The Bumper Machine will analyse a Video of up to 90 seconds for information like faces, movement, contrast, logos and brand information to create multiple 6-second long Bumper Ads. Advertisers will then be given the option to adjust these videos to their likes before launching the ad. Google will use machine learning to determine which ad works the best and optimise the content.
All in all, these new ad formats are certainly an interesting addition to the currently available tools and should help companies reach a much higher audience, while at the same time leaving more room for creativity and originality. The new automated ads will also allow advertisers to focus on other tasks instead of having to manage every little detail all by themselves.
Featured image: Prensa.cl
