Responsive Display Ads Images

Key Takeaways

Google's constantly testing new ad formats to go on search mobile the Google Display Network all sorts of things and one of the more recent versions is the responsive display ads so over the past couple of years they've been getting rid of all of the just plain text ads and using responsive display ads to take those gaps instead so what this allows advertisers to do is upload some images logos and then still use some customized text in the form of headlines and descriptions and then in real time it will put those together in a combination to fill the ad space that would normally be populated by either just a text ad or just an image ad on the gdn one of the things that I think is most important about these ads for advertisers to consider are the images themselves just the same way in social the thing that gets people to pay attention and stop scrolling through their feet is the image on the GTN for these responsive ads it's kind of the same thing if you just see some text off to the side you might miss it you're probably going to miss it and that's honestly one of the reasons that Google got rid of just the text ad only format in the first place people just stopped engaging with it because the web has gotten more advanced over the years and just text doesn't stand out anymore even if it's blue and green and whatever the ad formatting is that they've got on these things so what we need to do is keep the images in mind and the logos that we're using for our businesses while we're putting these ads together and we need to make sure that the images we choose and the logos and the way that we represent them are brand safe but are also eye catching and convey the message that we want it to have and then it's clear one of the big things we'll talk about today is scaling on these because sometimes even if an image looks fantastic large that doesn't mean that every instance of it could actually make any sense so today what we're gonna do is run through some just typical best practices for responsive display images on the gdn let's jump in when we go into the Google ads platform and we want to create a responsive display ad it's pretty simple just go into any of your display campaigns head over to the ads and extensions tab and then click the blue plus button it will allow you to choose responsive display ad right off the top so I'm just going to do that and hop right into the Builder itself okay so over here on the left you'll see the entire builder when you're trying to put together responsive display ads so again you've got headlines long headline description all this good stuff but today I want to focus on just the images and the logos and as we go through this I'm gonna be using some examples that wouldn't necessarily go together but each of the examples makes my point four different points so don't expect that I'm gonna have one complete ad by the time that we get done with this so when you first click on the images and logos piece it'll bring up this place where you can choose which images and logos you want to use so as soon as you click on the images and logos button you're gonna notice that there is this builder here and there are a number of different options of how you can actually add images to the campaigns the first and the default is going to be to scan your website then you can choose to upload just direct file from your computer there's also a stock image section that we'll run through here in just a minute as well as recently used so anything that's been in your campaign anything that you've chosen from recently will be in here as well and then the last piece is the your assets section what this means is that these are the assets you have chosen for this particular responsive display ad so by the time we get done with this we want to make sure we have at least one square image and logo available for this ad that we're creating so let's go through each of these and talk about how we can get some examples so the first is just the scan your website function this is pretty easy and I'm gonna start off by talking about the logos that we're going to use for our campaigns because I think that's usually where we're going to get things from the scan the website section so let's go to an example for Spotify exciting they have a good logo that helps exemplify what we need to do for our logos just type in your URL click enter and it will populate things from your website it is already scanned it if you scroll down even further here's the cool part it'll also pull in from your Facebook profile your Twitter profile Instagram LinkedIn any of the different ones so if you want to scan that just click scan and it'll pull up the different logos or images that it can find that it thinks are a veil on your Facebook page the same thing would be true for Twitter and whatnot as well so just keep that in mind that you can also scan your social profiles if that makes sense so for right now I want to stick with what's on the website when we start to put our ads together we want to make sure that we have logos and images so these are two separate pieces like I said I'm going to start with the logos so the first is that we might say okay this one down here is a great logo so we click on that and says use as and we can choose to use it as the logo wonderful it's already pre-populated as the one-to-one but it does not fit for the four to one format and we need to have one of each available so I'm actually just going to click cancel on this because I want to use one image to accomplish both I find it easier to do that if you can so instead what we can do is click on this one use it as the logo and then you'll notice that over here this four to one ratio looks great you can then click this drag it down a little bit move it around do whatever you want and make sure that you've got things centered up now for the 1 to 1 logo this looks a little bit weird right there's not really a place that makes sense and because it doesn't encapsulate all of it I mean it kind of does if you do just Spotify but then you've got a bunch of negative space up here and down here so you can actually do is scroll over and then you can choose this little toggle and scale it down to the actual size that you want to be for one to one and the editor here will always keep things in a 1 to 1 ratio so you get things centered up everything looks good hit continue and now it is chosen as your logo for the 1 to 1 and 4 to 1 and you'll notice that the your assets section has these two chosen so you can always come in here and check out what's going on so you can see that we've got the logos squared away and then we have some more images that we can have in here as well so now let's look for some images so we can go back to the scan your website piece I actually want to do a different example for this because I think it exemplifies the point a little bit more so instead let's say that we want to do something for a travel website right I have a client that does luxury travel a luxury international travel and one of the things that they offer are safari tours so people love to see zebras and whatnot on safari and this is a real-life example of something that we kind of had to choose which images we wanted to use for responsive display ads so here's what they kind of looked like we use the stock image piece and we went in here and we just typed in zebras and you can see that a number of different options come up they all have this Shutterstock watermark on it but as soon as you choose it and actually turn things live that watermark will go away so just just keep that in mind but you can see there are a number of different options in here for zebras over all right so there are a number of different pieces what we ended up with were these two down here on the bottom so we liked this one because we thought that it made a good statement that there could be a lot of zebras in in Serengeti right you might see a lot of animals because that's what people want but here's the problem when we look to scale the images of these ads it gets a little bit muted so I'm gonna go ahead and just add this as a as the landscape and the square image and then as a comparison I'm gonna use this one I'm gonna actually scale this up a little bit bring this over here okay so now we've got both of those chosen as our images and again this is not a reasonable example here so we've got a Spotify logo and some zebras and that doesn't make any sort of sense so just bear with me for the sake of example so now we've got these images in here and we are looking at how they are going to actually look on the Google Display Network right now it's defaulting to mobile and it's cycling through the key ad formats that it has in this preview over here so the first thing I'm going to do is click pause so it'll stop scaling through everything really quickly you can then come over here and click through the different ad formats and see where it's gonna show up so one of the things that we ran into is that we actually notice that the desktop previews of these were causing some issues so we had this image ad right so we chose the image that we thought had a lot of animals in it and if you start to look at it in some of these areas you think okay that looks pretty good you can see a number of different zebras that sort of thing this one's starting to get a little bit dicey so we kept going through all the different ad previews and the biggest area we had issues with with us was the native ad format because you'll notice that when you come down here to this super small version of what the image is this could be anything it's barely recognizable that this is a group of zebras you can kind of tell that as the Sun you can probably infer that there are animals there but it's really not gonna catch your eye while you're just browsing the web right it just doesn't it's not I caching if you're thinking that you want to take a safari trip this probably isn't gonna scream at you and even though it goes against the logic that people wanted to see lots of animals we actually found that the best version of this smallest image was actually the single zebra by itself people don't want to go on a safari and see just one zebra but this was still eye catching enough and it was dynamic that people still responded to it well even once the image had been scaled down that far so think about the scale of the image in all the different ad formats that could be coming out when you're choosing the images that are coming through here so all these different image ads again you might see that some of these look okay but it's a little bit more dynamic and it's much more eye-catching when you actually see this one zebra by itself it stands out you can then take a look at it and you can kind of see that there's another zebra in the background a little bit it's just something that will get people to stop scrolling so when you're choosing your images for responsive display ads think about not only what does it look like when it's in a larger format but once it starts getting a little bit smaller or if it starts being on a mobile device is it going to be clear what you're trying to sell and what you're trying to offer to the user and is it going to be compelling enough for them to click on the ad and that's it relatively simple but something really important to keep in mind while you're choosing the images and the logos you want to make sure that things actually make sense they fit in the boxes and they're recognizable at any different scale on the gdn because otherwise you're basically just putting an ad out there that's not really compelling you're probably not going to get a lot of clicks and it's just going to be a waste of time and effort so make sure that you're paying attention to what all of the different previews are like I said Google's constantly coming out with new formats testing new things testing new variables so if you start to notice something new make sure that you're clicking through all the different previews they have available choose different images test different things and make sure that you're using the one that's going to work best for your business in the long term thanks for watching our video make sure to subscribe to the paid media pros channel to see more videos