With Search, people find the information they need by entering search queries and Google algorithms show them appropriate information, products, or services. But Discover feed shows the content based on the automated selection that matches users’ interests, or at least what Google considers as such. That’s the main difference between Search and Discover.
Discover traffic is largely inconsistent from one period of time to another, according to Google analyst John Mueller. With significant drops happening now and then traffic tends to come and go and this is only natural for Discover. The algorithms display certain content on the Discover feed, hence the influx of traffic, on the other day people might be interested in seeing completely different topics on their Discover feed, and the traffic will drop.
When compared to Search traffic, the traffic from Discover is not related to certain search keywords. Site owners cannot predict the number of traffic they can get from Discover, since the number of people with particular interests who are browsing Discover feed is not known.
Muller explains that If a website is visible in the Discover feed, that’s good, but site owners should be careful because it can change pretty quickly.
Discovery Ads
But when it comes to Discovery Ads, they are entirely changing the advertising landscape. In a sense, it’s a shift towards a proactive approach to advertising. In conjunction with AI, it gives you a step ahead of your audience. This relatively new format makes it possible to showcase your ads to your potential customers. This sort of ad pops up on Discover feed and some other channels.
People see the ads even before entering queries on Google. The market researchers say that almost 85% of users make purchases within a day after they’ve found a new product, and that’s the reason for tapping into this new ad format, which could increase your sales and visibility. Discovery ads get a CPA of about $12, on average, and that makes it a budget option for companies to generate sales.
In short, it’s a quick and easy option to get potential customers familiar with the products or services your company offers using only one campaign format.
With this kind of ad, you’ll be able to limit your ad budget and customize target groups, likewise the other ad types.
In terms of format, there are two types of Discovery ads: Standard type (with one image) and Carousel (with multiple images).
The Standard Ad Type
For this, you’ll need to enter a Final URL and upload an image. Enter the URL of the page with an in-detail description of the products or services your company offers. Be more specific and don’t show the people your homepage. Get catchy images that will help you to attract more users.
When you research for ad creatives, you can use up to 15 various images — be it your own or stock photos from specific websites or screenshots of your site, etc.
The headlines are highlighted in bold font. There are up to 5 headlines, each one containing up to 40 characters.
The descriptions are shown beneath the ad headlines, as in the case of Search ads, descriptions provide additional details about your products. There could be up to 5 descriptions, with each one containing up to 90 characters.
Company name. Advertisers should attach the names of their companies to the ad copy.
CTA button. There’s a number of popular CTAs to select from, the likes of «Shop Now», «Buy Now», etc.
The Carousel Ads
This ad format allows advertisers to escape the user's attention with the help of multiple photos, which are shown as cards of two to ten per ad. The advertising platform shows the images in the exact order you upload them. Pay attention to the image format, since only square or landscape ones are accepted.
Scrolling through feeds is becoming a big part of the journey when your prospects search for something on Google. Companies can use these moments to become users’ favorite brands.
These relatively new ads are pretty adaptive, they appear on YouTube’s homepage and in the recommendations when users are scrolling for their favorite videos. These ads also appear on Gmail, in addition to Discover feed.
This type of ad is powered by machine learning. The ad platform offers Smart Bidding strategies for them, including Target CPA and Maximize Conversions. The latter option allows Google Ads to generate maximum conversions at the lowest CPA possible. It seems to be the most appropriate option if you expect to receive less than 10 conversions per day.
Even advertisers without a lot of ad money can put it to good use, because, as was already mentioned, the CPA of Discovery ads is only $12 on average.
Machine learning technology needs time and data to optimize ad performance. When setting up a new campaign or making changes to the current one, Google may advise advertisers to wait for a couple of days – up to several weeks – in order to test new bids or changes. This allows the system to examine how the audiences see new ads and then make appropriate adjustments.
Targeting
Discovery ads are different from Display or Search ads, which require keyword research. Advertisers can select the kind of audience they intend to advertise to and pretty much all the targeting options available for other types of ad campaigns, but Discovery is a good opportunity to attract users in such places that you wouldn’t attract them in any other way.
- Demographic targeting is an option to showcase your products/services to people based on such parameters as age, gender, interests, occupation, income, etc. So, you can target the same data as you would with a display campaign.
- In-Market Audiences: this option makes it possible to attract users who are planning to buy new things. The setting list of in-market audiences is quite extensive – be it users interested in purchasing new cars, computers, or software products.
- Life Events. This targeting option allows advertisers to reach users who are going to have a significant event in their life, such as launching their own startup, getting a new job, marriage, entering a university, or purchasing an apartment.
- Affinity & Custom Intent: Discovery ads reach people by their interests and search queries they entered on Google before. If users are interested in sports they will see in their Discover feed articles about a particular kind of sport, or political articles, if they were typing queries about politics before.
- Remarketing is a strategy that makes it possible to reach customers or just regular website visitors based on the previous interactions, including those users who visited specific product pages, or those who started making orders but abandoned their carts, or people who bought something from an advertiser’s store before. Remarketing also allows advertisers to attract potential customers who heard about their companies or services.
In case you don’t choose a particular audience, Google Ads will display your products/ services to a wide audience using its own factors and signals of optimization.
Are you familiar with the basics of targeting?
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Advertising to Several Groups
To advertise to several user groups you’ll need to have various ad groups or even ad campaigns.
The way of setting up Discovery ads is a brainer. People who have Google Ads accounts can choose a certain type of campaign specifically tailored for Generating new leads, Driving online sales, or Building awareness and consideration.
Advertisers choose a certain goal of their campaign in their Google Ads accounts. But try the other way, meaning create a campaign without a certain goal, which will give the highest number of options available. After that, instead of selecting a Search campaign, just click the Discovery campaign option. After doing so, you’ll have to give a name to your ad campaign. Having named the campaign, you are presented with the usual fields of target locations and languages. Discovery ad settings are quite similar to other ad formats. There’s a Final URL, Images, and Logos fields, which you can see in the settings of every Display campaign. Add images or photos if their ratio is 1:1.
The bidding part is not as important here. You fine-tune your Discover strategy based on your advertising goals. If you intend to generate as many conversions as possible, then select conversions as your goal.
When you select Maximize conversions, the advertising platform will be spreading your ad budget to generate the highest number of conversions.
Do your prior keyword and volume research, based on which you can set the budget for your campaigns.
Then, you’ll need to give an appropriate name to your ad groups. If you want to advertise to your in-market audience, call the group "in-market" for convenience.
The settings of Discovery ad campaigns are the same as the settings of Responsive ad format since there are up to five headlines and descriptions. There’s a usual Advanced URL option if you need it, and the ad templates for tracking. There’s a CTA text also. Be specific and use a catchy one if you need it, otherwise, Google can automate it for you.
Conclusion
Discovery ads are suitable for those companies that plan to grow the top of their funnels and want to improve the quality of the traffic they receive. You might have a harder time connecting to your audience since there are no keywords, which usually help to promote products/services. The Discovery ad format is mostly used for those audiences, which are still in the early stages of discovering new companies and the products they offer.
