Google Responsive Display Ads Best Practices and Examples

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel today I'm gonna be going over responsive display ads in Google so when you're running your Google Display ads campaigns these are the default types of advertisements that you can create for standard display campaigns and smart display campaigns I recommend using responsive display ads because what you're able to do is upload several images upload different headlines different description lines a call to action you can upload your logo you set your final URL and it's really that simple and what Google Ads is gonna do is they're gonna automatically create a lot of different ad variations for you and then they're gonna serve those ad variations and continue to serve the top-performing advertisements so I'm gonna show you how to create these ads now if you create a new display campaign and I just recently created my Google display ads tutorial if you're not familiar with creating display campaigns if you create your new display campaign as you go through the process of setting up your campaign it's gonna tell you to create a responsive display ad what we can do right now is we can click on our display campaign and we can create a responsive display ad so we'll go right into our ad group and you can see I have a responsive display ad I created here but we're gonna create a new one so I can show you how to go through the process so you want to click on the plus sign here and then create a new responsive display ad you can also upload your standard display ads here but what I want to do is create a responsive display ad for this video tutorial so what I generally do first is I'll fill out the easy fields first so to me the easy fields are final URL so we'll come up here we'll take our landing page I'm gonna be creating a responsive display ad that shows this promotion here so March sale use a code to save 20% on your order so we're gonna start with our final URL come back over to Google Ads and enter the URL at the very top then it's gonna say images and logos videos optional but up to five headlines up to five and then we have a long headline here descriptions up to five and then some of the easier parts business name and then under here is going to be more options and we can set a call to action text and custom colors so we're gonna start with some of these easy fields first business name will be farmhouse goals call-to-action text so you can do automated here Jenny what I'll do is just whatever fits my business the best so for this one it's going to be SHOP NOW so you might have something where you're an insurance company you want people to get a quote you're a travel company want people to book so just set the best call-to-action for your business we'll just set this as shop now and it's set to English custom colors so what we can do with colors is you just want to use the colors of your brand so I would just come here I'm gonna take some of the colors from my website and we'll enter these here as the main color and the accent color okay so those are some of the easy fields so just entering our business name setting our final URL and now the rest is gonna be building our actual advertisement so we're gonna start here in images and logos you're gonna see it says add two or more so you can add up to 15 different images as you're creating your advertisements so that allows you to create a lot of different types of display ads because like I said earlier Google Ads is gonna end up dynamically changing the images that you upload the logos that you upload if you upload a video all the headlines the long headline the description line so they're gonna mix and match all those different types of advertisements and then serve the best-performing one so you can add images by scanning your website so if we enter our website here Google will automatically pull in some of the different images from our website none of these pictures are great here the only one that I could potentially use is right here 1,500 1,500 so this is one that we'll use so we'll use this as an image and what you're gonna see it's gonna give us the option to use it as a landscape as a square or either/or or both so you have the option essentially to do whatever you want with your images as long as the size works for both image sizes now if you just have a landscape image like this it's generally gonna work for a square if you have a square image a lot of times it's just not going to work for a landscape so we can use this as our landscape we can use this as our square it's gonna work perfectly click on continue and now we can do is come over here to your assets and any of the images that we've uploaded are gonna show here so you can see we're using 2 out of the 15 images that we've created we can come back over here to scan website you can see we found URLs you can scan to get more results so they'll scan our Facebook page our Twitter our Instagram page so it'll take some of those different images now you can also come over here to stock images and you can enter words or phrases so if I enter a farmhouse for example it's gonna pull up a bunch of different images here that we can also use in our advertisements now I generally don't ever use any of these stock images when I'm creating advertisements but if it's something you want to do that you do that here we can also upload our own images so choose files to upload one thing you want to do so upload images and logos that meet our requirements or can be cropped so to look at their requirements real quick what we can see is image so we have the landscape that's one point nine one by one and then there's also the square just a one by one so the minimum required is what you really want to look at so the minimum required for a square is 300 by 300 the minimum required for a landscape image is 600 by 314 and Google does recommend uploading the highest quality images possible they allow you to upload large file sizes here so you shouldn't have any issues with uploading really high quality images to use for your advertisements and then with logo so with a landscape for the logo it's a little bit different it's gonna be a 4 by 1 so the minimum required here is 512 by 128 over here is always gonna be their recommended size so 1200 by 300 and then they have square so the minimum here is 128 by 128 so this is where you want to start is uploading some of your different files here your images your logos and then so once you come in here and you upload them what you want to do is you're gonna see here I haven't recently used so these are some of the images and logos I've recently used across my account that meet their requirements so once you upload these I can set some of these images as square or landscape images for my Google responsive display ads so we'll do that now so we'll use this as an image we can just set this as a landscape image maybe I don't want to use this as a square at all we'll click on continue so we have this set as a 1.9 1x1 now we'll use this one and we'll set it as an image and we'll use both so for this one I'll use a square and we'll use the landscape click on continue' so we have a couple different images here let's keep setting more advertisements now in my experience there's really no downside to setting more advertisements so we can use this right here landscape and square click on continue' so nuts will come over here we'll set this image right here so use as a landscape we'll use this as a square too so there we go click on continue so now we have a bunch of different images set so we've come to our assets you can see we've used 9 out of the 15 images we don't have any logos uploaded yet so that's I'm going to do next so we'll come over here to recently used and we'll set our logo so you can see I have a couple of logos here but I actually recreated these to make them look a little better so this is a square logo 500 by 500 use as a logo it's only gonna allow me to use this as the one by one it's just not suitable for the four by one format so we'll click on continue my 4 by 1 I uploaded 800 by 200 so we'll click here use AZ logo and we'll set this perfectly so it's the perfect size click on continue we don't have to crop it at all so now if we come into our assets we can use three more logos we can use 6 more images here there's really no downside to setting more images as you continue to create more advertisements but I think this is good for me to get started now 1 notes keep in mind you're gonna see down here by adding an image you confirm that you own all legal rights to the image and have permission to share the image with Google for use on your behalf in advertising or other commercial purposes so just make sure you have ownership to these images and you're able to use them to the point that you can actually advertise and try to advertise your business your products and your services so you really want to use some of original images or images that you're not gonna have any issues with legally so we'll click on save here and now we've added our images and logos and we have enough images and logos here to get started with creating our responsive display ad you'll see over here asset progress we have our images here next step add some headlines so they actually give you some step by step right here as you create your responsive display ads and then what you can also do is look over here with some different ad formats and see what your advertisements gonna look like so you're gonna see headline business name description they'll pull in the logo sometimes they'll pull in the image sometimes so if we just click keep clicking on these arrows to the side it'll start going through some of these different types of ads that we'll see so you can see what your advertisement is gonna look like so what I want to do is show you some sample response of display ads that I came across as I'm browsing the Internet so the first one we're going to come over here and right now I'm on USA Today and you're gonna see Squarespace website builder we have the logo down here Squarespace pretty small image over on the right-hand side and then just open so if I click on this advertisement it will open the landing page for Squarespace but you can see this is a responsive display advertisement right here and what you can do if you're not sure if it's a Google responsive display ad roll over here so right here you're gonna see ad choices if we kind of had choices and open it up you're gonna see this is essentially what they're responsive display ad looks like so you can see the image the headline the description line they have a logo here so this is a different logo than they're showing over in the actual advertisement for Squarespace so a couple different logos they're showing and this right here is going to be their call to action button so this is an advertisement by Google a responsive display ad so Squarespace website builder built this directly in their Google Ads account the way that I'm building this one right now so a couple more examples here so on this one I'm looking at Sports News and you can see right up at the top here so keyword finder by mangles see competitors keywords see the keywords that bring the most organic traffic to your competitor's website so we're gonna come over here and right now I'm on ap news.com and you can see are you a narc art expert prove it with this quiz so this is one of the longer headline formats so right here this is the longer headline I'll go through that in a minute this is their description line how stuff works open is gonna open the advertisement and again if you're not sure if it's a Google ad just scroll up here at the top if you see ad choices that generally means that this is gonna be a Google Display app so the last one I'll show you is gonna be on Motley Fool comm while just fool.com and you can see over on the right hand side they have a standard display out here so this is a standard display ad by Bluehost and then right underneath it is gonna be a QuickBooks ad so you can see the logo here the description line the headline their call to action and this is their image so these are with responsive display ads are gonna look like across the internet they really don't look much different than your standard display ads but they're much easier to create because you just have to upload several images several headlines so QuickBooks might have ten other images uploaded along this one and Google is serving me this combination at this time and they're essentially gonna see how all these different combinations are gonna perform so that's why you want to set as many headlines as possible as many description lines as possible set your long headline make sure using images and logos and then the other thing you can do is use videos here so what I can actually do is take some of these different images use them to create a video and then what I would want to do is upload that video directly to YouTube and then all you need to do is enter a YouTube URL here for a specific video that you want using your advertisement and it will pull up that video and you can use it in your responsive display ad so if I come over here to recently used you can see I've uploaded several of these videos here while just going directly to YouTube entering the URL for top PPC trends for 2019 Google Ads tutorial for 2019 so if I did want to add a video to this advertisement what I would do first is uploaded to YouTube enter the YouTube URL here and then under recently used or when it comes up in YouTube I can set one of these videos for my advertisement so I can click on Google ads tutorial will click on save and now it would add this video to my advertisement and if you want to see what that would look like under key out of formats here you can see image ads text ads native ads and then video ads so we can click on video ads here and if we go through some of these different previews you're gonna see it pulls in the video right here so those serve video ads across the Google Display Network and adding a video will only help expand your reach so there's really no downside to do it one thing you may want to do is set a video here and use that as its own advertisement so you might want to upload several videos to allow you to see how your video advertisements are performing along your response of display ads that are just using the images and the logos however what I would do is just set your video alongside with your images and logos so do it all at the same time because just one advertisement can end up turning into hundreds of variations if you upload enough images different logos and then different videos here as well so for this example I'm gonna remove the video this video is not good for what I'm promoting so we'll click on save so we don't have any videos here we just have our images and our logos next what you want to do is add headlines you have a long headline here so I showed you an example of a long headline so if we come back over and let's look at the example this is a long headline right here are you an expert prove it with this quiz so you can do a couple different things as you set your long headline here you only get one but it gives you 90 characters so it's as long as a description line but it might show along with your description lines so you need it to be unique so headlines what I would do first is we're gonna click on add headline and if you've created ads in the past and you come here to headline it might pull up some of these here so you'll see right now it's saying ideas based on my website and my this thing ads so you can use these right now with some of the headlines I'm gonna add my headlines right now and go through some of the reasons why I use those headline okay I went ahead and added all my headlines so I have five total headlines here I added my long headline and then I added my description lines so you can see my long headlines save 20% on all farmhouse decor and furniture during the farmhouse goals March sale now one thing I generally don't do is use any punctuation in my long headline and then in my description lines since they only show one description line per advertisement I'll use exclamation points in here sometimes you'll see some exclamation points at the end and then I don't ever really use any punctuation in my headlines so that way when is showing a headline and a description line I don't have exclamation points all over the place and it makes it pretty clear what I'm trying to promote so some of my different headlines straighten to the point save 20% on farmhouse decor March twenty percent off farmhouse decor 20% off sale at farmhouse goals farmhouse to core sale farmhouse goals March sale so essentially people should be able to gather pretty quickly that there's a sale going on on farmhouse decorations farmhouse home decor long headline so in this I'm able to call attention to what people actually save and the actual sale here so the March sale so I'm able to run all these advertisements until the end of March so description lines limited time twenty percent off sale March twenty percent off sales save twenty percent twenty percent off sale shop farmhouse Kohl's take take advantage of twenty percent off so I want to make sure people understand twenty percent off in every single description line so I entered it all there I didn't do that in the headline just three out of five I do think anything with twenty percent off is gonna perform the best on the Google Display Network so we set our five headlines our long headline our description lines you really just want to go over what the benefits are of people clicking through your advertisement what it is that you're trying to promote and exactly what people can expect if they do click on your ad so I always think there should be some type of benefit in a display advertisement just because you don't want to just tell people hey here's our product make sure they understand that there is a benefit there maybe it's a limited time promotion whatever it is you want to make sure people understand that they're getting some type of value when they're clicking on your advertisement so we come down call-to-action is that we have our business name set we have our custom colors here so our main color and our accent color so all we need to do is click on save here and it will add our new responsive display advertisement directly to our ad group so you're gonna see here if we come to the bottom we have our responsive display out here now one thing to keep in mind is let's say I'm running multiple campaigns what I can do is I can take this advertisement we can come over here to edit and we can copy it and then if we come back over to a different campaign so we'll come to all campaigns we have a farmhouse goals display campaign here let's say I created this advertisement in this campaign I want it to be in this campaign as well so we can just come right to this campaign go into our ad group and then you can see right now it's saying you don't have any enabled ads so what we can do is click on paste and then we can come right here farmhouse Kohl's display campaign we're in this ad group so we have it selected so make sure it's selected over on the right-hand side you can select multiple ad groups here if you want to click on done and then you have a couple options pause new ads after pasting we're not going to do that if the ad already exists in the destination create a duplicate so if you don't want to duplicate don't check this if you do want to duplicate than check this so we'll click on paste and now it's going to add this responsive display advertisement into this ad group in a different display campaign you can also do this in different ad groups so if you have a display campaign with multiple ad groups you don't have to create the same advertisement over and over you can just copy and paste it and then you can always come here to view asset details that's gonna allow you to see your headlines what the status is so you're gonna see asset type headline your long headline and then some of your images down here as well so you're able to see performance for some of your different headlines your long headline or description line so I actually accidentally let an advertisement run from a previous campaign so if we come back to that one so this is for a different advertisement that I've ran in the past and you can see it's gonna show each asset and then it's gonna show performance over here so good it might have low performance so it'll show you how your ad is performing and then some areas where you might want to improve on it so what you can do is take what's good from this performance over here create a new responsive display ad or just update your existing responsive display ad remove anything that's low so you're gonna see farmhouse sinks to core and more not performing well farm homestyle the core not performing well so you can see something like this top rated farmhouse decor 20% off farmhouse decor so when you give some type of benefit so a top rated 20% off you give some type of reason that someone might want to click your ad it's gonna perform better so just keep that in mind as you create your responsive display ad and you start to look at the overall performance you can also look at combinations here you're gonna see it's gonna say I don't have any combinations for the date range I've selected but you can start to learn some of the top performing combinations and you're gonna see these combinations are ranked by the number of times they appeared but you can learn which ones are driving you the most results and the most conversions for your budget so those are responsive display ads I would highly recommend using them in your display campaigns they're gonna automatically change to fit essentially any type of sized ad that Google will run across the Google Display Network so when you do run these ads and you use video along with the images you have your logos there it's gonna help you build some of that brand equity and help you build some winning app combinations that are going to drive conversions for you so again if you have any questions leave them in the comment section thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC youtube channel