What Are Google Discovery Ads?

What are Google Discovery Ads? 

How can they benefit my business sales?

Discovery campaigns to help reach up to 3 billion customers across Google feeds to achieve your performance goals in Google Ads. Thanks to Google's audience and customer intent signals, this campaign type helps you deliver highly visual, inspiring personalized ad experiences to people who are ready to discover and engage with your brand—all through a single Google Ads campaign.

Benefits

Reach your ideal customer at scale with a single campaign. You enter the building blocks for your ads—like headlines, high quality inspirational images, and logos—and we'll show your ads to highly interested customers using the bid goal and budget that you set.

Discovery campaigns include the following features:

• Reach more of Google with a single ad campaign. With the ability to reach up to 3 billion people monthly on the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Discover and the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs, you can now reach more potential customers as they browse everything from the latest fashion trends to new cooking recipe videos on popular Google properties.

• Drive engagement with richer, more relevant ads. Thanks to Google's unique understanding of customer intent, you'll be able to show more relevant, meaningful ads to people when they're most interested to learn more about your products and services.

• Visually rich ads rendered natively across Google properties at scale. Designed for discovery as consumers browse their favorite content and feed-based experiences, our ad layouts rely on machine learning to build and showcase your assets seamlessly across devices—helping you spark customer interest and action with less effort and time.

• Automated bidding options to meet your media performance goals. You can use Maximize conversions bidding, Target CPA, or Target ROAS to optimize your campaign bids to meet your media marketing objectives. You can also benefit Google’s machine learning when it comes to audience performance by opting into optimized targeting.

Use high-impact images to stop consumers mid-scroll?

• Reuse imagery from existing media campaigns (like social and video) to make the most of Google's feeds.

Why: Reusing already high-performing imagery helps you save time building your campaigns while driving a seamless brand and product story across Google and YouTube's most immersive surfaces.

• High-quality images inspire people to take action with your brand.

Why: High-quality and high-resolution images help build brand trust and tell a more engaging story about your products or services — all while helping inspire customer action. 

Tips: Use the “website scan” feature in the asset media picker when creating your ads. This will find and upload images directly from sources like your website or social media.

• Use all the available Discovery ad layouts with a variety of image aspect ratios to maximize your ad's reach and impact.

Why: Discovery ads appear across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, automatically appearing in the image options and sizes that lead to the best performance across each property.

Unlock more of the right audience

• Focus on audiences that are more likely to convert based on performance you’ve seen in your other campaigns.

Why: Successful Discovery campaigns often start with repurposing high-intent audiences—like custom intent or remarketing—that perform well on Search, Video, and Display campaigns.

• Keep audience expansion enabled to expand your campaign’s reach.

Why: Audience expansion can help you find more people who are similar to your current audience and can help lift overall performance.

Learn more about how you can unlock the right audiences.

3. Choose the right budget and give your campaigns time to optimize

• Choose an average daily budget at least 10 times the value of your target cost-per-action (CPA) bid and wait for at least 40 conversions before making changes to your campaign.

Why: Discovery campaigns perform better with more data. Gathering enough data requires 2-3 weeks for Google's machine learning to make ideal optimizations for your campaign.

Learn more about choosing budgets for your campaigns.

When to use

Discovery campaigns may be a good choice for you if:

• You want to drive conversions with your media at scale (through a supported marketing objective): For example, you can use Discovery ads to drive sales, newsletter signups, or more website visits.

• You want to reach new customers with your media: By sharing visually rich, inspiring brand creative across feeds on Google properties, Discovery campaigns can help you drive interest from potential customers when they're open to trying new brands. For example, you can extend a successful audience strategy for social or video campaigns to new audiences on Google's feeds.

• You want to reconnect with your most valuable customers: As consumers return over time to find content on the Google feeds that they enjoy, Discovery campaigns give you more opportunities to drive action from people who know your brand best and are most likely to engage with it again — whether they've previously made a purchase, engaged with your YouTube channel, or visited your website.