SEO

Google Discovery Ads Dos and Don’ts For More Successful Campaigns

Published

2 years ago

April 6, 2022

Google Discovery Ads Dos and Don'ts For More Successful Campaigns

When Google Discovery campaigns first came on the scene in 2019, I was skeptical they would amount to much.

Their available inventory across Gmail, YouTube, and the Discovery feed seemed too small to amount to anything of significance for most advertisers.

As Google has iterated and expanded, though, I’ve changed my tune.

While not as scalable as standard Google Display or YouTube campaigns, I now know the value that these campaigns can have, and work to incorporate them for most of the accounts I am involved in.

So – what does it take to find success with Google Discovery Ads?

The foundation is all about serving the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Lucky for Discovery users, that ad unit has several advantages over standard Google Display campaigns (and search, too).

Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

Discovery’s #1 Targeting Differentiator.
Layering Targeting in Discovery Campaigns.
Discovery + Retargeting.
Optimized Targeting.
Discovery Ad 101s + Dos and Don’ts.

Discovery’s #1 Differentiator: Targeting

With its ability to serve impressions at the moment of intent (the search), Paid search is generally the most efficient Google advertising product.

With Google Display, you can run ads to retargeting and similar to audiences based on a pool of past paid search clickers, but you cannot explicitly target a cohort of people who searched for specific terms before.

With Discovery, you can.

Within Discovery campaigns, Custom Segments allow you to explicitly target based on Google search activity.

Never before have you been able to create an ad group that only targets searchers of select keywords within YouTube, Gmail, and the Discovery feed.

This is really powerful.

This targeting unlocks a wedge intent stage between display prospecting and paid search unique to Google Ads.

Custom Segments: How To Set Them Up

Because Google owns all properties (Discovery, Gmail, YouTube) that Discovery Ads show on, you can ensure that keyword targeting serves impressions to past searches of your keyword variants.

Setup is easy.

When creating your ad group, select New Custom Segment.

Screenshot taken by author from Google Ads, March 2022

From there, select the People who searched for any of these terms on Google radio button, and input your keywords.

Targeting Google Searches with Custom Audiences

Screenshot taken by author from Google Ads, March 2022

By doing this, you will serve ads to anyone who searches for these terms on Google.

One note.

Assume these keywords are treated as broad match.

Nonetheless, this targeting option is Discovery’s differentiator – and it is a good one.

Pro Tip: Segment this targeting out into its own ad groups/campaigns to ensure you have the control you need on things like spend, budget, bid strategy, etc.

You will likely want to maximize reach and frequency to this audience subset and differentiate the experience from your other display campaigns.

Hone In By Layering Targeting Criteria

Like Google Display, Discovery supports affinity, in-market, life event, and demographic targeting options.

And like Google Display, these targeting options can layer on top of each other.

One of my favorite combinations is Custom Audiences + Targeted demographics, given the personalization opportunities with imagery in the responsive display ad units.

For example, if I’m targeting high net worth individuals, I could layer on the top 10% of HHI via Demographics targeting.

Selecting high earners with Google Ads Demographic targeting settings

Screenshot taken by author from Google Ads, March 2022

Pro Tip: With Discovery, you can serve “display” ads to people interested in your competitors.

Use keywords, key competitor pages (login, pricing), and apps to digitally surround competitor prospects and customers with a personalized pre/post experience.

The visual element of Discovery makes it a great tactic for these conquesting campaigns.

Discovery Retargeting Is A Must

If you run standard display retargeting campaigns, Discovery retargeting campaigns are a no-brainer.

Discovery offers inventory not available through standard display.

Given that retargeting campaigns often hold the best ROI for advertisers, maximizing impressions as much as possible makes sense.

In addition to the extra inventory, Discovery’s 4:5 aspect ratio ads and carousels are unique to the campaign type. They provide an opportunity for a differentiated experience compared to standard display.

Pro Tip: Use Customer Match lists to target lead ad customer lists with ungated brand content relevant to them.

People engaging with the Discovery feed are looking for content to consume.

If you have content you want to push out to a high-value first-party data list, this is a great way to do it.

This poses an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your expertise, communicate a value proposition, explain a feature, share a past client story, talk through the onboarding process, etc.

Things To Avoid: Optimized Targeting

Optimized Targeting, previously known as Audience Expansion, is a feature Google enables by default when setting up new campaigns and ad groups.

Google will tell you that they identify signals of likely converters to give you more leads at a similar CPL as your non-“optimized” initiatives.

The collective experience of colleagues and coworkers has been that there is very little case to keep this setting enabled.

Most advertisers should avoid it.

It provides very little visibility or control with targeting, meaning limited optimization opportunity.

With retargeting campaigns, it should be avoided 100% of the time, given that it changes the campaign to target beyond reengagement.

Discovery Ad 101 + Dos and Don’ts

Discovery’s targeting is unique, but ad units also offer up some unique opportunities.

Like Display, Discovery Ads are responsive. You give it a series of image and text inputs, and the algorithms determine the optimal ad to serve, depending on the user’s demographics and behaviors.

While they are nearly identical to Google Display responsive display ads, there are a few differences between those and Discovery ads.

Mainly:

Discovery ads do not support video.
Discovery ads do offer a responsive carousel ad format.
Discovery ads do offer a mobile, newsfeed friendly 4:5 aspect ratio.

Foundational principles of display ads apply to Discovery as well. It all comes down to personalizing the pre/post click experience with content of interest and/or value and capitalizing on the unique features that ad type offers.

Discovery Ad Dos

Do utilize the 4:5 aspect ratio. Google’s tool can help, or you can hire a freelancer to resize your existing banner for less than a dollar (when done in batch).
Do maximize the images, headlines, and descriptions used for each ad. The more you can give Google to test, the better your ad strength will be.
Do utilize creative learnings from your social channels. The mindset of the Discovery ad viewer is very similar to that of someone scrolling social feeds.
Do use images with people in them. They typically drive better CTAs than images without people.
Do consider tying a lead gen form to your discovery ad – especially for warm audiences. Extra credit if you integrate your CRM to automate lead flow.
Do monitor your asset level reports for indicators your ad text and image components are resonating.

Discovery Ad Dont’s

Don’t imply interactivity (e.g. Add a CTA button). Google is more strict on that compared to standard display campaigns
Don’t use much overlay text in your images. It leads to lower CTRs on average. It also leads to sub-optimally formatted ad units for certain inventory
Don’t overuse low-funnel KPIs with cold audiences. Like other display and social tactics, you’ll generally want to warm your audience up before offering up a low funnel call-to-action
Don’t utilize Discovery campaigns before you have conversion tracking set up. Bid strategies for Discovery all utilize conversion data.

Conclusion

Discovery Ads are a new(ish) format to Google Ads that is becoming increasingly important to utilize as privacy takes center stage.

They offer several unique advantages over other ad types across Google Ads and beyond, including search keyword-level targeting.

By keeping marketing best practices at the top of your mind during campaign setup and optimization, Discovery will become a staple component of your digital marketing efforts.

More resources:

Featured Image: art GALA/Shutterstock

Related Topics:Ads campaigns Discovery donts dos Google Successful

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Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Published

55 mins ago

April 23, 2024

Max

Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.

So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.

You’ll learn:

Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.

With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy.

Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

SEO

How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords

Published

4 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.

Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.

There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.

How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Organic keywords report

The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”

Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:

Filtering out branded keywords in Organic keywords report

If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.

Finding popular, low-difficulty keywords in Organic keywords

How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section

Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.

You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.

How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t

Go to Competitive Analysis
Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section

Competitive analysis report with multiple competitors

You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.

Content gap report with multiple competitors

You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:

Selecting all 3 competitors to see keywords all 3 competitors rank for

Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
Enter your competitor’s domain
Go to the Paid keywords report

This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.

Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.

You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.

1. Create pages to target these keywords

You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.

However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.

Here’s how to do that:

Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab

For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.

Keywords under the cluster of "digital marketing"

2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics

You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.

How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:

Export your competitor’s keywords

Paste them into Keywords Explorer
Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
Look for Parent Topics you already have content about

For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”

Our competitor ranks for seven keywords that fall under the "press release template" cluster

If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.

Site search finds that we already have a blog post on press release templates

If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”

Keywords under the cluster of "press release template"

To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”

3. Target these keywords with Google Ads

Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.

For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”

If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.

If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.

You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.

Learn more

Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:

SEO

Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important

Published

20 hours ago

April 23, 2024

Max

Google confirms that links are not that important anymore

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.

Background Of Links For Ranking

Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.

One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.

The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.

Kleinberg wrote:

“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”

This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.

Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.

What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?

At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.

Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:

” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″

Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:

“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”

Why Links Matter Less

The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.

But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.

The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.

Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less

In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.

Google March 2024 Core Update: 4 Changes To Link Signal

The documentation previously said:

“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.

Links are not just listed as just another factor:

“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.

Mueller explained:

“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”

Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.

I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
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Why Google Doesn’t Need Links

The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.

Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.

Read the research papers

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre