The 5 Types Of Google Ads

There are many types of Google ads you can run in your campaigns. The ads you use will depend on the campaigns that you set up to promote your products and services.

 

Your ads are the face of your brand, so you want to ensure that they represent your business as well as possible. These ads help you choose how to communicate your business, products or services to your prospective customers.

 

Your ads can help you target people as they search on Google and partner websites, watch YouTube videos, browse network websites, check their emails and so on.

 

So, here are the five types of Google ads that you should consider using in your campaigns.

 

Expanded Text Ads

Expanded text ads are the standard ads in search campaigns. They are the most frequently used and up until recently were the default ads you would set up, but now Google is pushing advertisers to set up responsive search ads – which you can read about below

 

An expanded text ad is made up of the following

 

Headline One – 30 character limit

Headline One – 30 character limit

Headline One – 30 character limit

Description Line One – 90 character limit

Description Line Two – 90 character limit

Path One – 15 character limit

Path Two – 15 character limit

Final URL

 

And this is what it will look like as you create it in your campaign.

 

 

Writing effective text ads is important. It helps you target the right people and businesses and prevents anyone that’s not relevant from clicking your ads. It helps to improve your click through rates (CTR) and that helps boost your Quality Scores. And ultimately it leads to better conversions because that is what every business needs.

 

Some things to consider as you write your ads are:

 

1. Highlight more benefits than features – what makes your product or service unique, and how does that help your prospects? This answer should be prominent in the ad, preferably in the headline to achieve higher clicks and a better click through rate (CTR). So, talk less about what features the product has and more about how it benefits your future customer. You will need to know the product or service very well, inside and out, to do this effectively and a little research is helpful.
2. Include a call to action – let your prospects know what actions you want them to do. Do you sell a product? Do you want them to call? Or do you provide a whitepaper that you want them to download? State it clearly in the ad and make it prominent in one of the ad headlines.
3. Include the keyword in the headline – your main keyword in the ad group should be added to the main headline. This makes your ad look more relevant to searchers and increases the click volume and click through rates. And you could add it to the description too and when people see your ad, the text is made bold to highlight the keyword that they have searched with.
4. Use all headlines and description lines – headlines one and two are required and description line one is required too. But headline three and description line two are optional. But it’s recommended to use all spaces to get the maximum benefit of ad targeting and allow the machine learning system to have more details with which to optimise your campaigns. You will see a better performance in click through rates, cost per click, Quality Scores and conversions.
5. Add between three to five ads per ad group – each ad group should have between three to five ad groups for testing purposes. That should include at least two expanded text ads and one responsive search ad. The system will rotate the ads and will use performance data and the search context to run the best ads more often to improve conversions. This is less possible if you only have one or two ads in the ad groups

 

Responsive Search Ads

Responsive search ads are very similar to expanded text ads in that you have headlines and descriptions. And each headline has a 30 character limit and descriptions have up to 90 character limits each. Also you get to add a final URL and two path fields to add some keywords and make your ads look more relevant.

 

But that’s where the similarity ends. Responsive search ads provide you with a lot more space than you get with expanded text ads. You get 15 headlines and four description lines to promote your products or services.

 

 

 

 

However, this doesn’t mean all will appear in the search results – but like expanded text ads you’ll have up to three headlines and one description showing each time. But the benefit with the responsive search ads is that the machine learning system can test many different combinations of your headlines and descriptions and that helps achieve better click through rates, click volumes and potentially more conversions.

 

Responsive Display Ads

They are the default ad format when you create your Display campaign. They allow for greater efficiency and scale and are able to appear in formats that your uploaded image ads cannot.

 

You create Responsive Display Ads directly in Google Ads as opposed to uploaded Display Ads that you create outside of Google Ads and upload to your campaign.

 

They automatically adjust to the available ad space and they can run in native and non-native inventory.

 

To get started, simply upload your assets like images, videos, headlines, logos and descriptions and Google will automatically create your ads

 

 

According to Google, Responsive Display Ads usually see 50% more conversions at a similar cost per acquisition (CPA) when used with uploaded image ads.

 

Uploaded Image Ads

These are image and AMPHTML ads that you upload in your Display campaign and they give you greater control. You build these outside of Google Ads and then upload them into your Display campaign.

 

However, they are likely to limit your reach, as they don’t have access to the same inventory as Responsive Display Ads.

 

They are also known as image ads and you upload them as a .zip file into your campaign. They only run in banner-eligible slots so they have limited reach compared to Responsive Display Ads.

 

Google Ads supports image ads in the following formats and sizes:

Formats GIF, JPG, PNG
Max. size 150 KB each
Ad sizes

Square and rectangle

250 × 250 Square
250 × 360 Triple widescreen
300 × 250 Inline rectangle
336 × 280 Large rectangle

Skyscraper
120 × 600 Skyscraper
160 × 600 Wide skyscraper
300 × 600 Half-page ad

Leaderboard
468 × 60 Banner
728 × 90 Leaderboard

 

Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic search ads are one of the newer ad formats released in Google Ads. These are dynamically updated based on the search queries that they appear for and this is determined by the content on your landing pages.

 

They use content from your website to automatically create relevant headlines and select a relevant landing page based on the terms used by searchers. Your ads show on searches that are relevant to your business that you may be missing with your keyword-based ad groups.

 

A dynamic ad group enables Dynamic Search Ads for your campaign. So you don’t add any keywords in a dynamic search ad group as you would in a standard keyword-based ad group running expanded and responsive search ads. Instead, the machine learning system targets searches based on the content of your website and shows you examples of searches your ads may show on as the image below shows.

 

 

The image above also shows that you will need to provide two description lines as you would with an expanded text ad. These are not dynamically generated as the Final URL, Display URL and the headline are.

 

Shopping Ads

Shopping ads are a unique way to advertise in Google Ads. They usually take much longer to create than the other ad types but have features that influence consideration and boost sales.

 

Shopping Ads include an image, title, description, delivery details, price, ratings and offer if available.

 

 

One major advantage with Shopping Ads is that they target people who are in the later stages of the buying funnel. When a customer sees a product ad and clicks they are more likely to purchase because the price is available and there is an image that shows the actual product.

 

The Shopping ad can be expanded to reveal more details. As the image below shows, the description is visible and more images are available for you to view and you can click the pin to add to your collection

 

 

Your Shopping Ads will appear on the search results pages, to the right of the text ads results and also above the text ads

 

And you can view them on the Shopping page where you can see many more listings and can use the filters like Price, Colour, Features, Product Ratings etc to see the products that are relevant to what you want