Creating and managing a Discovery campaign
is simple.
You can reach your ideal customer
at scale with a single campaign.
You enter the building blocks for your ads,
and we'll show your ads to highly interested customers
using the big goal and budget that you set.
At the same time,
it's important to provide automation
with the right, high quality ingredients
to drive the best results.
Follow these steps to get started with your first campaign.
The first step is to select your main campaign objective
and the conversion goals
you want to drive performance towards.
The goals selected here
will be the primary optimization target for your Discovery campaign.
Consider using the same goals for Discovery
as you do for other social campaigns.
Once you've set up your conversion goals,
select Discovery as your campaign type.
Next,
choose your campaign’s location and language settings.
Now, select a bid strategy for your campaign.
Make sure that your bid strategy
also aligns with your business objectives.
For example,
if you were focused on maximizing conversion value
and different types of conversions
generate different values for your business,
choose “Conversion value.”
If you are focused on maximizing conversions,
choose “Conversions” from the dropdown menu.
This is a good bid strategy to use
if all conversions are worth the same to your business.
Soon,
budget and target forecasts will become available
to help guide you in your decision.
You can also add a cost-per-action (CPA)
or return-on-ad-spend (ROAS)
target to your bid strategy.
Not sure where to start?
A helpful reference point
is your average CPA or ROAS
from the last 30 days on comparable campaigns
that are optimizing towards the same conversion goals.
The campaign may also
auto-suggest a CPA or ROAS target
based on your historical account performance.
You can use this or edit the number as needed.
After you set your bid strategy and targets,
determine your campaign’s budget.
You can click on “More Settings” to adjust other settings like,
your ad serving schedule, or start and end date.
Tracking template and final URL suffix settings
are also available here.
Next, you're going to create an ad group
and select the Audiences you'd like to reach.
We know who our audiences are,
what they are searching for things they need,
like products they want to buy,
article topics they’re interested in,
places they want to go.
All of these touch-points across Google feeds
create audience signals that allow you to expand
and narrow your defined audience
to personalize experiences
for the right user at the right time.
Additionally,
you can apply Google's AI powered audiences
plus first party data
to define an audience first strategy
tied to your business goals.
Google’s real-time signals and machine learning
allow you to find additional customers
and also re-engage past site visitors
with your data and customer match.
If you want to reach new customers
with high purchase intent, use in-market audiences.
If you're already running search campaigns,
you can use these three best practices
to create a custom audience:
Use top performing keywords from your search campaigns.
Use your website taxonomy to guide campaign structure.
Add keywords based on broad concepts
and structure them in tightly themed ad groups.
In addition to amplifying audiences with interest signals
from user behaviors like Affinity Google segments.
You can also target based on demographics.
And finally, you can even learn about
your top performing Google audience segments
in our new “Insights” tab.
These insights illustrate key learnings
related to optimized targeting
and will help you analyze performance,
identify growth opportunities,
and learn compelling characteristics
about your converters.
We also recommend utilizing Optimized Targeting,
which allows you to find new and relevant customers
likely to convert within your campaign goals.
It uses Google's machine learning
to look beyond optional, manually selected audiences
to improve a campaign's performance
and acquire customers you may have missed
with only manual targeting.
Now let's take a look at how to create your ads.
The quality and variety of the creative assets you provide
plays an important role in your campaign’s success.
Ad groups let you manage different kinds of creative assets.
Your assets include:
the final URL or landing page
that you'd like to send customers to.
Images,
logos,
text headlines and descriptions
and a call-to-action.
Regarding creative best practices,
we recommend utilizing your top performing assets
from other platforms,
like social or video, and use them for Discovery.
There's no need to create new assets.
We recommend utilizing at least 3 square images
3 landscape images and 3 headlines
and 3 descriptions for optimal performance.
Having both square and landscape images
is critical to maximize reach
across these ad slots.
And by following the “Rule of 3”,
you can access up to 50+ asset combinations.
And as you're looking at inspiring consumers,
it is critical to showcase high quality visuals.
Make sure to use HD images
and to follow our creative guidelines and policies.
Assets disapproved due to “low quality”
will not be used,
reducing your chances to perform,
and reducing your reach.
You can also get more out of Discovery
with additional formats like the multi-image carousel
to showcase your top products, services, or categories.
There’s also the 4:5 Portrait
(similar to other popular platforms, like social media)
to capture more attention
and screen share across our mobile canvas
to drive action among prospective customers.
You can also check the Ad Strength indicator
to see how you may need to improve your assets
in the UI, itself.
And finally the Lead Form extension,
which allows you to generate leads.
After user clicks the collapsed ad,
they will be directed to complete the form.
After you create your ad,
you're nearly done creating your campaign!
Check the Summary page before you publish the campaign
to see if anything's missing or if you have any errors to resolve.
Once the campaign starts running, give it a few weeks
before you evaluate results,
especially if your business experiences
conversion lags or delays
where customers need extra time between
when they first engage with you
and when they complete the conversion.
In the short term,
look out for any ad disapprovals
to make sure your ads are running as intended.
Also check your campaign status
to see if it's limited by budget.
If this happens, consider raising your daily budget
to make sure you're capturing as many conversions as you can.