Google Ads advertising and its campaign types

In this article we will take a simplified look at the basic campaign types that can help you target and land the right customers.

Good to know

Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is an advertising service that lets people advertise with ads in Google search results and across its network.

A campaign is a set of ads with the same budget, geographic targeting and other settings.

Available campaign types

To begin with it should be said that Google Ads currently offers as many as 8 basic campaign types; in this article we will cover seven of them. We will summarise the Smart campaign and its options in an article on our blog soon.

• Search network campaign - with an ad you reach people who have shown an interest in a service or product.
• Display network campaign - show yourself to prospective customers online through banner advertising.
• Shopping campaign - present your products with shopping ads.
• Video campaign - reach and engage viewers on YouTube and across the internet.
• App campaign - support promotion of an app.
• Performance Max - advertise across the whole platform.
• Discovery - use interactive ads similar to social media ads in Google feeds.

Search network campaigns - show up when people are looking for something

People are searchers. Besides various treasures, the meaning of life and true love (car keys :), they also look for practical information. For more than 20 years people have used Google to search for information — currently as many as 3.5 billion times a day. If you are not in the top places in search, it is as though you did not exist. The advantage is that you pay only per click and the price is set in a real-time ad auction. So if there is great interest among advertisers in given keywords, they are dearer than those advertised on less.

Text ads

This campaign type was still available some time ago. Today, if an account contains a text ad and it is active, it still shows. The problem comes when creating it again or optimising it, since this ad type can no longer be created or edited. If these ads bring you the results you want, though, you can still use them. Generally, however, we recommend creating a responsive ad.

Responsive ads

Responsive ads are easy to create. You only enter several headlines. From them Google Ads will choose and continuously test various combinations automatically. On that basis it can improve campaign performance by adapting the content to prospective customers as well as to the various screen widths they appear on.

Ad preview for mobile

Ad preview for desktop

Dynamic search ads

For advertisers with elaborate, extensive sites, dynamic search ads are a great help. The headlines and landing pages of dynamic ads are generated from content on the advertiser's site, so the ads are always relevant and save time when creating them. All you have to add is the creative description. It matters to pay attention to choosing the right landing pages that customers reach first.

Advantages

• You can show an ad to prospective customers who have already shown an interest in the services and products you offer.
• They are ideal for you if you offer help with urgent problems, a towing service or a plumber for instance.
• You can make yourself visible even with a limited budget, provided the campaign is set up correctly.

Google Ads display network campaigns

Try to picture any ice hockey match. Throughout the arena, on the ice and on the players' shirts you will find plenty of ads and brands. For brands it is an excellent investment, since they know their audience and can connect their brand with a sporting experience.

Display campaigns work on a similar principle. With them you can reach people doing various things in the online space. The ad shows in Google services such as YouTube and Gmail, on various sites within the Google Display Network, all across pages on the internet (portals such as sme.sk and aktuality.sk) and in mobile apps. Graphical ads can help you introduce your business to particular target groups likely to be interested in what you sell. You reach your prospective clients throughout the buying cycle and raise awareness of your brand or directly influence the buying decision. You influence who your ad shows to — by demographic data, behaviour or interests. You can likewise choose where the ad shows, by keywords or by the site's subject matter.

Ad formats

There are several formats to choose from, from graphical image advertising, so-called banners, to dynamic banners (dynamically showing products the user viewed on the site) and animated banners (banners in HTML5 and AMPHTML5 format). We can also use responsive ads, that is image-and-text ads created directly in Google Ads. Image-and-text ads or HTML5 ads that show in Gmail are provided by Gmail ads.

A practical example of display network advertising is the Google Ads remarketing campaign. It is advertising deliberately shown to people who visited a site in the past and viewed its individual pages. That means if you were on a page with shoes, a very similar type of shoe will show in banners while you read your favourite online daily. With this type of advertising its success rate rises considerably too.

Advantages

• Huge coverage across the whole internet
• You can reach customers who have not yet heard of you. An ideal choice for promoting new products and services
• Graphical treatment of the ads

Video campaigns - video ads on YouTube

Almost everyone has at some point looked for a video guide, a video recipe, fails or a favourite track on YouTube. That is exactly why YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, with more than two billion signed-in users every month. People watch so many videos that they could be entertained throughout a whole flight to the Sun and back — as many as 3,000 times over! Every time a video plays there is the potential to show your ad to someone who might be interested in what your business offers.

Most often video advertising is used to build awareness of a brand or product. For performance campaigns, optimisation for conversions is available too. Video ads show on YouTube, in videos on partner sites and in apps in the Display Network. It works so that you can target video ads at audiences, that is groups of people with particular interests, intentions and demographic data estimated by Google. You can learn how to go about YouTube video campaigns from an article by our senior PPC specialist Ivka: How to go about YouTube video campaigns.

Video ad formats

Video advertising on YouTube can be very creative and offers us several formats:

• Non-skippable in-stream ads are short 15-second videos that play before, during or after another video.
• A video ad that plays before, during or after other videos is a skippable in-stream ad. The ad can be skipped after five seconds, for which the advertiser does not pay. You pay for a view of a whole video shorter than 30 seconds. For longer ones you pay for a 30-second view. You can choose the option of paying per 1,000 impressions.
• A text ad with a video thumbnail that shows in YouTube search results, in suggested videos, on the YouTube home page or on partner sites is a video discovery ad (also called in-feed). Clicking the video thumbnail plays the video. You pay for that click.
• A bumper is a 6-second non-skippable video that shows before or during another video. With a bumper you always pay per thousand ad impressions. It is a very effective form of advertising.
• Out-stream ads are video ads for mobile devices only (phones and tablets) that play on partner sites and in apps. Advertisers are charged only if at least half the ad's area is visible to the user for at least two seconds (you pay per thousand viewable ad impressions).

Advantages

• A huge base of engaged viewers
• Demographic targeting options such as age, gender and geographic location
• Advanced options for targeting videos by topic, category, particular YouTube channels and keywords, so the ad shows to the right viewers
• Plenty of ad types that let you choose the formats and creative that will best help achieve your goals

App campaigns

Do you have a mobile app connected with your business, or an app customers are meant to buy? With Google Ads you can promote it with an app campaign across Google's largest services including Search, Google Play and YouTube, the Discover feature in Google Search and the Google Display Network. Unlike other ad types in Google Ads, you do not have to create separate ads for app campaigns. Instead your ads are designed for you automatically.

You enter the text, a starting bid, a budget and your campaign's languages and locations. You can also add some HTML5 elements if they are relevant to your business. Google Ads then adapts this information for a set of ads in various formats and networks. Various asset combinations are tested and the best-performing ads will show more often. Google Ads uses machine learning. It is therefore advisable to leave the campaign running for at least 7 days so it can optimise. So there is no need to hurry with changes. With this ad type you set a target cost per app install (cost-per-install) or cost per in-app action (cost per action). If your goal is app promotion, you can choose from three campaign subtypes: App installs, App engagement and App pre-registration (Android only). Each campaign subtype focuses on different actions and bidding strategies.

Advantages

• Reaching people interested in particular in-app content
• Advanced customisation including specific creative assets
• Extending reach and increasing conversions, since app campaigns with connected feeds usually reach more users and bring more conversions thanks to improved targeting and the adapted formats feeds allow

Shopping campaigns - focus on shoppers

We live in an age when customers are far more demanding, want information at once and do not want to click through masses of pages to find basic information about a product. Google Ads offers us the option of showing advertising specifically for product searches on Google pages. They are based exclusively on products and essentially give buyers important information about a product before they even visit an online shop. They are called Google Shopping ads and in search they show an image of the product along with its name, price, shop name and reviews.

Types of shopping ad

There are two types of Shopping campaign. The first type is a product shopping ad. It is created using the product data provided in your Google Merchant Center account. Local inventory ads will help you increase traffic to your local shops. They use local inventory product feed data to show your bricks-and-mortar shop's products to nearby customers.

Advantages

• Better qualified prospective customers
• Simple campaign management focused on retail
• Wider coverage
• Powerful reporting tools and competitiveness data

Performance Max campaigns

This is a new goal-based campaign type. It gives advertisers access to the whole Google Ads inventory within a single campaign. It is designed to help find converting customers across every Google channel, such as YouTube, the display network, the search network, Gmail and Maps.

Performance Max helps raise performance through the conversion goals you set. Using smart bidding it wins more conversions and higher value by optimising performance in real time on the basis of your particular advertising goal, the assets provided, creatives, audience signals and feeds.

Advantages

• Discover more customers who convert
• Increase conversion value
• Gain detailed statistics

If you are interested in learning more about this campaign type, how it works and what its advantages are, read our article devoted to Performance Max.

Discovery

Discovery ads are engaging and interactive. They give room to tell an interesting visual story about a brand's products. Advertisers using Discovery ads will be able to show one image of their product or service, or several images in a swipeable carousel format. We can compare them to Facebook ads. At the same time they feel very native, meaning they adapt to the environment they show in. A product feed can now be connected to Discovery ads as well. You can read about how Discovery ads work and why we should use them in an article by our colleague Jakub.

Advantages

• They raise engagement with more compelling, more relevant ads
• They render natively

There are plenty of options

Google Ads offers many campaign and ad types. What matters is choosing the right one for your business goals. Do not hesitate to get in touch. We are digital hunters — we will help you take aim at your target.