Ultimate guide to creating ad creatives in google display network
Why display ad creative is important
Display Ads creative are kinda deal in display networks!Imagine you can run thousands of billboard ads across a country. Imagine you can change whatever creative ads you’d like to test with real audience. Seem impossible, that are the exact possibilities with google display network.
Literally google display ads network is the digital billboards ads in 100X scale. Ad creative is crucial to success when it comes to ads creative display networks (google display , Facebook & other social network channels).
Reason being is the display network usually tends to have user with less intent. After all you don’t log in to Facebook to buy/signup something. However when you got bored of watching cat videos and friends post, you will look at the ads. Since you didn’t intent to interact with ads when you logged into Facebook, ads creative has to be impeccable to get your attention.
In search network, users are attentively searching for things and they more likely to click if they see relevant ads not necessarily attractive. However, in display networks user seldomly search for anything. Hence to address the low intent and make the user engage the responsibility falls on the ad creative.
What the purpose of a display creative?
Besides getting the attention and engaging the users, an display ads creative in display network should offer these things.
Clear messaging
One of the common , yet overlooked mistake by advertisers is creating a cipher ad copies. Imagine user doesn’t intent to click the ad creative in the first place . He looks at the ad creative only when he’s bored.
The attention span of the user in the internet is measured in seconds. If he needs to refer dictionary, Wikipedia, IMDb to understand your ads then you’re failed in the very first step. He takes only 2-3 seconds to decide whether to engage with the ad or not.
If you’re ad copy failed to convey message in first few seconds, ad will lost in short attention span resulting in poor engagement from the user.
The guideline is simple. Create an ad creative that is simple yet conveys the message clear as water. It might be tempting to use over creative messaging but remember objective of ads to engage the user.
Concise
Once you understand the important of clear messaging, then it’s time to optimize for delivering a concise message. You might have to decide which of the crucial information to show to users. You should have a better idea of what are the offerings that users cares about.
This could be anything from simple customer service , pricing, to unique value proposition. But your ad copy should be verbose to distract or confuse the users. Include necessary informations that you mentioned in the landing page.
Speak of your target audience
Success ad creatives are the ones that user’s relate to. What the difference between the poor ad creative and a viral image?. Answer : Relatability to user. By creating and using the ad creatives that user can relate to, you can skyrocket the engagement metrics like click to ratio.
How to creative relatable ad creative?
Simple : Do the research. Often most advertisers assume themselves that they know what could be relatable with target audience. 99% of the time, this will be wrong. Often intuitions are biased and doesn’t have any scientific data to prove.
So do a simple research about your target audience. You can research things like , Gender, age, education, marital status, fears, aspirations , insecurities, etc. If you incorporate any one or all those elements in the ad creative, you will see astonishing results.
Color
The color is the very important thing which can make or break the ad. Yet often it’s disheartening to see advertisers to pay little or no attention to the color. Just be changing the color of the creatives, you will able to uncover which color performs well.
Also, when you are creating a campaign internally, it’s very important to take color into consideration. Often, a same color was perceived differently in various ethnicities and races. By using the color your targeting group enjoys, your ad can get high click through rates because of the subconscious mind.
On the other side, if you use wrong color in wrong country/ethnicity/race, you will see a poor engagement for the ad creative. In those cases try running different versions of ads with different colors.
Banner blindness
Banner Blindness is a phenomenon where users sees tons of ads everyday yet he barely noticed anything. Hence user might physically seen the ads but brain has avoided subconsciously resulting in banner blindness.
Resulting advertisers loss of ad budget and lack of engagement. Chances of an display ads creative standout of the rest increases if the above mentioned best practices are used to create ads.
Ad types in Display
The ad inventory of display network is so wide and deep, offering four types of ad creatives.
- Text ads
- Banner ads
- Gmail ads
- Mobile app Ads
Text ads
The text ad in the display network is similar to search text ads. Text ads are light and can be loaded in the slow internet even in the feature phones. This is how it was started. But now google deprecated text ads and came up with with new type of ad.
Responsive ad
Responsive ad is the the replacement for text ads. Similar to text ads responsive ads are versatile, can also reach a larger ad inventory. This will be extremely handy if you don’t have graphic designer to design all ad dimensions. Because google takes care itself with these types of ads.
Banner Ads
Banner ads are the common ad type used across the google display network. This comprises of images in different dimensions to fit into the google display network inventory.
Gmail Ads
These are the special types of creative that’s used in gmail marketing. Google offers plenty of templates to decide for advertisers to show ads in gmail.com
Mobile app ads
Mobile app ads are shown in the google android apps. Ad creative design for mobile app is different due to small ad creative size. This should also incorporate the new age ux based on the mobile usage pattern.
