Google Discovery and Gallery Ads
Did you know: a whopping 73 percent of desktop and 81 percent of mobile/tablet searches are powered by Google?
With this power-packed reach, it comes as no surprise that marketers, including event organisers, focus heavily on Google when vying for traffic.
Now, Google’s advertising options are about to expand further, making Google even more appealing. During the recent Google Marketing Live event, the search giant announced new ad formats would be coming across a number of its mobile services.
The new advertisements will come primarily in two formats: “discovery” ads that place sponsored posts in places where people are typically looking for tailored content, and “gallery” ads, which include multiple images users can swipe through.
We combed through the eight-hour event livestream to dig into what the changes mean and how organisers can use these new innovations to ultimately grow their events.
Discovery Ads
Even though it was only introduced last September, Google Discover now reaches over 800 millions users worldwide with this feed.
If you aren’t familiar with this feed, based on your interests, Discover shows personalised topic items and information on mobile devices without searching. The feed is built into many Android home screens, inside the Google app and on Google’s mobile homepage, and is powered by intelligent machine learning and algorithms that anticipate content the user will find interesting.
Later this year the Discover feed will get ads for the first time, appearing alongside suggested news stories and other content geared toward a user’s interests. These native image ads will also be inserted within Google Images search results, the YouTube mobile home feed and the Gmail mobile Promotion tab.
Like the Discover feed itself, Discovery ads use Google’s “power of intent” – meaning Google uses signals from previous site visits, viewed videos, app downloads and map searches to serve up ads.
This new ad format is especially relevant for event organisers and marketers as they provide a way to connect with users when they are most open to uncovering new products, services and information — and aren’t necessarily performing a specific search.
Gallery Ads
Gallery ads, which have started to become available across some accounts but will be fully rolled out later in the year, will pop up in mobile search results. Gallery ads are a carousel display of four to eight images for users to swipe through, with 70 characters available as a tagline per image in the gallery.
This new, visually appealing and interactive ad format is meant to make ads a lot more noticeable at the top of the results page. Combined with search intent, Gallery ads allow advertisers to more easily show the products and services that they have to offer.
For organisers and marketers, this type of ad will likely be a more effective way to promote events since more engagement is driven by interactive ads than standard text ads. Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP, Google Ads & Commerce, has said that Gallery ads are expected to generate “up to 25% more interactions” than traditional search ads.
Another benefit is that advertisers will only pay on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis if a user swipes through 3 or more of the images in the carousel or clicks to the landing page. Hopefully, Gallery ads will also be available on the desktop not too far in the future.
These new ad formats, combined with Google’s massive search volume, give organisers more options to increase the effectiveness of event PPC campaigns.
Talk to the Tag Digital team now to start planning and be ready to incorporate Discovery and Gallery ads when they become available for all accounts later this year.