Looking to capture audiences in the moments when they are ready to make a purchasing decision? Look no further! Last week, Google announced a few new features to help businesses grow demand with Discovery ads. 91% of people have purchased or submitted information based on an ad they saw in their feed after they saw the information1.
The three newest improvements to Discovery ads are:
- Use a product feed to dynamically populate products.
- Product-level reporting and data-driven attribution.
- Incrementality testing with Conversion Lift experiments.
The Chacka team was in the beta phase of product feeds for Discovery and has best practices to share with advertisers looking to dive in.
Capture audiences and make your brand stand out across the most engaging Google ad networks.
What are Product Feeds for Discovery?
Want your brand to stand out across the most engaging Google ad networks? Advertisers can now show consumers items based on their interests and intent. Most notably, retailers can use lifestyle images and short text with their Google Merchant Center catalog to deliver more relevant ads. Additionally, you can couple them with Video action campaigns to drive more engagement with consumers who are exploring content on YouTube.
Our initial impressions about the product feeds for Discovery:
“The new product allows for product feeds to be used for Discovery ads to show relevant products to consumers and dynamically power the ad insertion. Over 90 days, we saw a 2-percentage point increase in CTR using Product Feeds ads versus our general remarketing campaigns on Discovery.”
– Sarah Kernan, Director of Paid Search, Chacka Marketing
Early Findings
During our Beta access, we quickly identified one no-brainer use case – combining product feeds with our Discovery retargeting campaign. Although the ad inventory was limited during the beta, we found greater performance for the new tactic than we previously saw within the same retargeting campaign utilizing traditional ad formats.
“Not only were CTRs higher due to serving the target audience with the most relevant products to their interests, but we drove more action with a smaller budget. The average ROAS for Discovery featuring the product feeds was more than 2.5 times the incumbent ads,” Kernan says.
Keep in mind: Due to the limited nature of scale available, the size of your remarketing audience pool will be critical in reaching statistical significance in any test run with this tactic. Make sure to set yourself up for success by testing with audiences where there will be adequate data. We recommend using audience lists of at least 100,000 users or experimenting with audience optimization to have a large enough list size for scale.
Final Considerations
As with any beta, it is never the final product. Part of being a participant in a beta means navigating a less-than-ideal user interface, a lack of API integration with third-party tools, and always being prepared to pivot and provide feedback to Google to make the final product the best it can be.
Keep in mind that ads are dynamically populated by your feed, so it’s incredibly important to have a clean feed with clear descriptions. Our team is excited to share more about this product soon.
Sources:
1. Google/Ipsos, Consumer Feed Behavior Research, August 2022, Online survey, US consumers aged 18+ who browse feeds (feeds defined as: Google, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Pinterest) monthly or more often. Base: Consumers n=2,000)