New Changes to Google Discovery Campaigns & Ads

Back in 2019, Google rolled out Discovery Campaigns as a Beta. Seer launched these net new campaigns across several clients to see what the visually appealing ads could do for reaching clients’ goals and saw tons of success!

For one client, in particular, we had been seeing a decrease in homepage views Year Over Year for several months. To offset this decrease, we launched a Discovery campaign and saw fantastic results immediately:

• +153% more sessions to the homepage YoY
• CPA -36% under our goal CPA
• Impressions were 9% of total campaign impressions
• Clicks were 19% of all campaign clicks

Since then, we’ve continued to see great results from this campaign. Haven’t tried these campaigns yet because they weren’t available in your account? Lucky for you, as of 5/27, this campaign type is now available to Google advertisers globally!

💡 Further, earlier in 2020, Google introduced a new Beta within Discovery Campaigns and it’s coming after Paid Social budgets. Yep, you guessed it, Carousel Ads. So of course we had to test it out!

• Since implementing Carousel Ads (for the same client as above) on 6/2, conversions remained stable (+0.77%) and CPA improved -23.69% despite Seer spending -23.11% less Period Over Period due to outside factors.
  • CVR also increased +6.61%, telling us these ads resonate well with users.
• Since launching on 6/2, these ads have spent 45.77% of the total Discovery budget and have driven 45.57% of its total conversions at similar CPA (slightly higher) and CVR (slightly lower) to the non Carousel ads.
  • While the Carousel Ads drove fewer conversions at a slightly less efficient CPA and CVR than their traditional counterparts, we are keeping these running to entice our audience across the Discovery network with a variety of visually appealing cards to click through.
    • CTR however for these Carousel ads, was +24.33% higher than their traditional counterpart, telling us our audience is more likely to click through to the site with this new format.

How to Set Up Carousel Ads

• To set up this new Beta ad format within your Discovery campaign, navigate to the Ad level and filter to your Discovery campaign.
• From there, Click the  button and find “Discovery Carousel Ad.”

• Select your Discovery campaign and the ad group you want your new ads to live in.

• Like other Google efforts, you’ll want to give these ads time to ramp up and gain traction! See Google’s tip below:

Smart bidding is required and ad rotation and frequency are actually not even available. It’s time to lean into automation, baby!

Already running Paid Social campaigns? Repurpose your best performing assets and rotate those puppies into a Google Discovery campaign! Once again, the engines are on your side. If you’re already using Facebook’s Dynamic Creative to test various images and ad copy in your Social campaigns, then you already have a clue as to which assets to use in your Discovery campaign!

Let us know if you have any questions about Discovery and/or Carousel Ads within Discovery and we’re happy to help out!

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