Google Ads Discovery Campaigns Tutorial 2022 - Examples and Best Practices

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the surfside ppc youtube channel today i'm going to be going over google ads discovery campaigns and i'll be creating a campaign throughout this video now just to give you a quick introduction discovery campaigns allow you to reach people on the youtube home page and the watch next feeds on google discover and on gmail their native advertisements through google ads that are very easy to create you basically just provide your assets and google ads will serve the top performing ad combinations i'll go over more of this later in the video when it comes to who you're targeting you can utilize your data or any of the different audience targeting that's available through google ads so there's a lot of different options here so let's start by building a campaign now before we get started with building our discovery ads campaign i just want to show you some different examples directly from google ads so you can see the first one here on the left hand side is an example from youtube so you can see sneaker advertisements and the way that they look the other one over here on the in the center is you're going to see a google discover advertisement so obviously you could see a very nice image there so it looks like a really good advertisement and then over here on the right hand side you can see it's a gmail advertisement example so just three different places your ads can run so youtube it's watch next and the home feeds google it's gonna be through google discover so you can see your advertisements will show up when people are in their discover feed and then over here on the right hand side when people are in their social and promotions tabs in gmail that's when they'll see your advertisements so we're going to come over here and we're going to start building our campaign okay so we want to start in our google ads account and what i'm going to be promoting today is on my farmhouse goals website i'm going to be promoting an april 2022 promotion where people can use a certain code at checkout for 10 off all furniture on my website so we're going to come back over here to google ads we want to create a new campaign so you want to start by choosing your campaign objective and i would highly recommend just focusing on one conversion when you're creating this campaign so you want to choose either sales or leads here now you can use some of the other objectives but with sales and leads you're going to get the best results so in my case i'm going to choose sales here it's going to pull up some of the different conversion goals in my account so what i want to do is remove two of these conversion goals so we're going to remove this one and i'm just going to focus on purchases which is my main conversion goal in my account so we're going to click on continue after that you need to choose your campaign type so down here discovery run ads on youtube gmail discover and more so this is where we want to choose next you want to choose the web page people will go to after clicking your ad so i'm going to actually take my landing page we're going to copy it and we're just going to paste this right here and then you need to name your campaign so let's do okay so my campaign name april 2022 farmhouse furniture sale so we're going to click on continue okay so start with our campaign settings here you can see we have our conversion goal all set next you want to choose our location targeting so you can you want to make sure you're just targeting the locations where your customers are located in this case i ship products to united states and canada so we're going to choose these two locations languages you want to choose the languages your customers speak so in this case i'm just going to choose english for my language targeting want to keep scrolling down here next is going to be your bidding strategy so you want to be optimizing for conversions and you can set a target cost per action as well which i prefer to set a target cost per action so if you don't set a target cost for action you're using the maximize conversions bid strategy if you do set a target cost per action you can actually say you want to drive conversions at a certain cost or less basically so in this case they're giving me a suggested target cpa of three dollars so i'm going to apply that to this campaign and ultimately over time you want to bring your target cpa down so that you can drive more conversions within your budget so we're going to keep scrolling down here so for budget let's just say i want to spend around a thousand dollars this month so what i can do is enter a budget of 33 you want to take your budget and essentially multiply it by 30. so in this case if i have my budget set at 33 a day i'm going to spend somewhere between 990 and a little bit over a thousand dollars now they're recommending a budget of at least 50 per day if i'm driving theoretically 11 conversions so at a 33 budget target cpa of three dollars let's just say i'm driving conversions at three dollars per conversion then i would drive 11 conversions per day this budget is more than large enough i always recommend setting a budget to where based on your cost per conversion you're driving at least three four conversions per day the more the better but if you're not if let's just say my target cpa was thirty dollars my budget was thirty three dollars you wanna make sure you have a much higher budget than your target cpa so in this case three dollars here 33 here i think that's perfectly fine i could always raise my budget if i'm seeing really good results so let's keep coming down here to more settings so we'll click here you can set specific ad schedules so choose when your ads run during the day in this case start and end dates so since it's a an april promotion i want to choose the start date as april 1st and then i want to select an end date of april 30th so i want to make sure my ads are only running during april so that people aren't seeing these advertisements in may i could always come back and cha update my advertisements and change as my promotion changes more settings down here so content exclusions discovery campaigns will automatically exclude moderate to highly sensitive content so you don't really need to change anything here so we're ready to move on to the next step and now it's going to come to targeting so i would highly recommend using different types of targeting starting with custom segments so with custom segments you can easily create your own custom segments so just click here click on the plus sign for a new custom segment what i like to do is choose people who search for any of these terms on google so you want to name your segment and then you want to add google search terms you can actually just copy and paste a list of keywords if you already have them otherwise what i can do is i know i want to target people looking for furniture so specifically i want to target people looking for farmhouse furniture so i could choose something like farmhouse furniture i can find some different synonyms like rustic furniture and country furniture and do something like shabby chic furniture and then what you want to do is just keep adding keywords to this list so using my landing page i could do accent furniture bedroom furniture which would include dressers and nightstands and headboards and bed frames dining room furniture which would include dining tables all of these different keywords here and you want to keep entering them here so your weekly impressions should continue to grow as you add more and more keywords so i've already created this audience all you need to do is enter a bunch of google search terms here name your audience and click on save you can also expand the segment by including specific websites or apps but in this case just enter i would say at least 20 search terms click on save you can enter more and more search terms because you're basically trying to target people who have used those search terms on google so i already have this audience here so i can click to add create custom segments go to browse and you can see i have farmhouse furniture furniture search terms so we're going to click this one here you can see my custom segment it says is between 10 million and 50 million weekly impressions right now it's showing 41 million weekly impressions so that should be really more than enough just to run this campaign and i can just target this custom segment for now but let's go through some of the different targeting options here as well i would highly recommend using your data so use some of your remarketing audiences you can just create a discovery campaign and say okay i just want to target my let's just say anybody who has visited my website over the last 30 days so right now that would be this audience right here is all users of farmhouse goals through my google analytics 4 account and i would get rid of my furniture search terms custom segment here and i could just target people who have visited my website and use my own data to create a remarketing campaign that just runs as a discovery campaign on youtube on google discover and through gmail so since i want to combine some of these different audience segments here i'm going to use my custom segment for farmhouse furniture i'm going to say anybody who's been to my website over the last 30 days we want to target them with this promotion as well let's use a similar segment too so we can come over here to browse and instead of website visitors we can choose similar segments so these are built based on our website visitor audiences here so let's use similar to and i have a furniture audience here so you can see the size of this audience is 10k to 66k so we'll choose this one here as well now one issue you might run into when you choose a similar audience is weekly estimates might not be currently available because your similar audiences are always changing based on your actual data so your website visitor audiences are going to change as you get more and more people visiting but right here similar to my furniture audience i want to target that as well even though it says zero i still you could see it says 10k to 66k for size i could also use some of my other similar segments there too now we'll keep coming down interest and detail demographics so if i come in here and we go to browse you can see some of these different options in market segments life events detail demographics and affinity segments i prefer to target in-market segments if anything but affinity segments are going to be very broad so what i like to do is if you come here to search you can search things like furniture whatever it is you're promoting enter a search there and see if you can find some different in-market segments life events and some different things that you can target so in this case home furnishings those are people who are interested in purchasing home furniture so it's the perfect audience for this type of campaign so we're going to choose this in-market audience and this will give us plenty of weekly impressions by using a custom segment by using our data and by using an in-market audience again you don't have to combine all these i like to combine some of these different segments and then as we scroll down here you're going to see optimized targeting i prefer using optimized targeting as well so google may find people beyond your selected audience but it's only going to help our conversion rates by using optimized targeting and then you can also use demographics as well and choose specific people you want to target in this case i'm going to leave my demographics wide open and just focus on some of these different audience segments and we're going to use optimized targeting so that will bring us to ad creation so we want to create a discovery ad and what you want to do first is start with your final url so where you're sending traffic to in my case i'm sending people directly to my furniture page and i'm also going to duplicate this ad and send people to a separate landing page as well because that way google ads will serve my top performing advertisement based on whichever landing page is driving more conversions so we're going to come back over to our campaign so we have our final url set here next you want to choose our images so you want to add up to 20 images so if we just scroll over this question mark real quick you can see some of the different images and image sizes they recommend so landscape images square images and portrait images and basically what you want are images that are at least 1200 by 1200 or larger so what i'm going to do here is click on the plus sign for images you can choose from your asset library so images you've already uploaded you can upload new images here you can use some of the stock images they have and you can scan your website in my case i'm going to choose my asset library because i've already uploaded a bunch of furniture images and you can see all of them so 1500 by 1125 1500 by 1500 so you want to use very large visual images and then what we can do is let's say i click on this here and we go to selected you can choose between these three different ratios so this one works perfect for this it works well as a square and it works well as this too so we can select three ratios and that will count as three of our 20 images so we want to keep doing this for some of these different images here so we'll select this one so again this one works well for all three too so we have our landscape our square and we have our four by five image here so we have three more images added so now we have six out of twenty so i'm going to kind of fast forward to this but you wanna keep selecting images and you can take some of these images for example i could take this one and just use the square and select one ratio so you just want to choose the best possible images that you think will help people actually go to your website and complete your conversion goal so i'm going to fast forward to this part a bit and pick all 20 of my assets okay so you can see i have a total of 20 selected assets i would just highly recommend making sure you have enough images here so that google ads can serve different advertisements to people and they're not seeing the same images over and over you never know what people are looking for so somebody might be looking for patio furniture somebody might be looking for accent furniture somebody might be looking for living room furniture so you want to use different images to try to reach people based on what they're going to look at so we have some of these different ad previews here so you can see the youtube watch feed and it will continue to go through and show some of these different advertisements so you can see the way that your ads are going to look but once we have our 20 images here next you want to add logos so with logos what i like to do is choose one square logo here so you can see we have our one logo already selected so we're going to click on save you can add up to five logos so if you want to use some different logos that you have you can do that as well now we come down to headlines so we want to add our headlines and we can add up to five different headlines you just want to click on this plus sign so the headlines are all going to be 40 characters we come down here we have five description lines those are all going to be 90 characters and then we also get business name here and call to action text so i'll do those two real quick because business name is just going to be farmhouse goals and for call to action text i'm just going to use shop now okay so now i'm going to enter my description lines and i'm going to enter my headlines i'm going to fast forward to this part a little bit and not type out each individual one through this video okay so i have my five headlines here so just kind of focusing on the sale that i have so i could also do april sale and different things like that i could use different headlines but you really just want to focus on the sale and then go over some different selling points upgrade your furniture today farmhouse furniture for your entire home shop the best rustic furniture sets so we're gonna come down here to descriptions and we're gonna enter all five of our descriptions okay so we have our five description lines here too and one thing you just want to look at the top so our ad strength here is excellent we've used all of our images all of our headlines and all of our descriptions so this should help us kind of get the best results with our advertisements and with our targeting so we have our entire advertisement ready so we just can click on create ad here now you can see we have our advertisement so we can create a brand new advertisement if we want which you can do it'll only help your performance or we could do is come right here duplicate this advertisement and then just change our final url so instead of sending people to my product category furniture page i could just say let's just send them directly to farmhouse furniture and i'll set up a landing page at that exact page as well where i go over the exact promotion what code people can use at checkout now keep in mind this entire promotion is not something i'm actually running on my website just showing you this to give you a good example for how to run discovery campaigns so we have our second advertisement here we update our final url and all we need to do is click on apply changes and we have two advertisements here and we can click on next okay so they give us the following issue may negatively impact our campaign's performance they want us to increase our budget to fifty dollars per day again i think our budget is perfectly set based on trying to spend one thousand dollars for the entire month of april and with our target cpa bid of three dollars so we have our campaign name type objective we have all of our campaign settings here our ad group who we're targeting and our advertisements so all we need to do now is click on publish campaign and our discovery campaign is going to start to run now there's different options you can choose as far as targeting different audience segments in different ad groups using different advertisements so you can always come here duplicate your ad group so we have ad group one right here say okay let's copy this ad group and then all you need to do is click on paste and it's going to duplicate that exact ad group and then you can just go into your audiences and adjust your audience segments so you can choose to basically say i want to have an ad group that one targets my remarketing audiences one targets similar audience one targets my custom segments and one targets in-market audiences and choose to run them as different ad groups rather than combining them like i did it's really a matter of preference and then you can choose to pause certain ad groups on certain days if you want to make sure that maybe the in-market audience is seeing your advertisements one day and then another day maybe similar audiences are seeing your advertisements so you can kind of adjust who is seeing your ads but i do think discovery campaigns can be very useful if you are running a promotion like this and you just want to make sure you're getting your point across to people as they browse youtube or google discover or use their gmail so these are discovery campaigns if you have any questions about them please leave them in the comments section you can run your discovery campaigns along with search along with performance max and you really shouldn't have any issues with too much crossover there performance max ads do run at in the same places that discovery ads do along with other places as well so you could just run performance max campaigns rather than discovery campaigns but for right now it just gives you more access to some of the inventory through google ads so if you have any questions about this please leave them in the comments section thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the surfside ppc youtube channel