- Expansive reach: Reach up to 3 billion customers across the YouTube Home and Watch Next feeds, Discover*, and the Gmail Promotions and Social tabs using a single campaign.
- Rich and relevant creative: Inspire consumers as you showcase your brand or products in visually engaging images, rendered natively across Google properties.
- Drive action with the right audience: Combine this incredible reach and powerful creative canvas with Google’s understanding of intent to anticipate what your customers want and drive results.
This article explains how to create Discovery campaigns. Learn more about Discovery campaigns
*Discover is currently unavailable for consumers in Australia, France, and Germany.
Before you begin
- Gather your ad's assets like headlines, descriptions, images, and logos. To drive better performance, select your highest-quality image assets, such as brand and inspirational imagery featuring minimal text and effective lighting. You can also repurpose top-performing image assets and messaging from existing campaigns on other platforms, like email, video, or social.
- Make sure that you have sitewide tagging enabled in the account. Make sure that you’ve set up conversion tracking and that you meet the conversion-based eligibility requirements.
- You must comply with our Personalized advertising policies.
- Make sure that you have a sufficient daily budget to account for at least 10 times your target CPA bid.
Optimize your campaign as you create it
As you create your campaign, you may receive notifications based on your setting selections. These notifications may alert you of issues that can result in decreased performance or that may be significant enough to prevent you from publishing your campaign.
The campaign construction navigation menu that appears as you construct your campaign provides a holistic view of your construction progress and will call attention to notifications that you may want to address. Move between steps in the navigation menu to easily review and resolve potential issues with your targeting, bidding, budget, or other campaign settings. Learn more about features that help you create a successful campaign
Instructions
Step 1: Set up your campaign
- Sign in to your Google Ads account.
- On the page menu on the left, click Campaigns.
- Click the plus button
then select New campaign.
- Choose a marketing objective of either 'Sales', 'Leads', 'Website traffic', or 'No goal'.
- Select the Discovery campaign type.
- Click Continue.
- Pick your geographic and language targeting for this campaign.
then select New campaign.- Select your audiences. There are several ways to target your Discovery campaigns to the right audience. You can add the following targeting options: custom intent audiences, your data and in-market.
- Select your bidding strategy and enter your average daily budget. Learn more about Automated bidding
- Click Save and continue.
- Click Save.
Note: For audience lists, make sure to have at least the following (more details):
- Google Search Network must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
- YouTube must have a minimum of 1,000 active visitors or users within the last 30 days.
- Gmail must have a minimum of 100 active visitors or users within the last 30 days in the Display Network.
For Google Analytics audience lists:
- Make sure to activate Google signals in your Analytics account.
For Custom Intent:
- Discovery ads support search keywords only.
Create your Discovery ads
- Set up your single-image ad
- Set up your multi-image carousel ad
Step 2a: Set up your single-image ad
Upload assets to create your first Discovery ad
- Navigate to your Discovery campaign.
- On the page menu on the left, click Ads & Extensions.
- Click the plus button
- Enter your assets.
Discovery ad asset specifications
|
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 1 |
Minimum: 3 Maximum: 5 |
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 5 |
|
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 1 |
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 1 |
|
Minimum: 1 5MB maximum file size Further supported for serving on image search mode only |
Minimum: 1 5MB maximum file size Note: Images that do not meet this aspect ratio can be uploaded and cropped within the interface. |
|
Minimum: 0 Note: Portrait images won't appear on YouTube |
Minimum: 1 5MB maximum file size Transparent background recommended |
|
Legend:
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| Headline (required) |
Your headlines are the first line of your ad. Write headlines that make sense combined with any of your descriptions, images, and landing page. |
| Description (required) |
Your descriptions add to your headline and invite people to take action Write descriptions that can be combined with any of your headlines, images, and landing page. |
| Images (required) |
To get the greatest reach, upload multiple 1.91:1 landscape images. Select images that work well with your logo and can be combined with any of your headlines, any of your descriptions, and your landing page. Supported file types are JPG, PNG, and static GIF. You can crop the uploaded images to the required aspect ratios right after choosing the images. |
| Business name (required) |
Only one business name can be provided for a single creative. It can be up to 25 characters. |
| Logos (required) |
Logos will be rounded off in ad preview and live rendering on some of the properties. Upload logos that combine well with any of your headlines, descriptions, and images, and center them. The most common non-.gif formats are accepted. |
| Final URL (required) |
Default landing page that customers will reach on clicking the ad. |
| Call-to-Action text |
If set to “Automatic”, Google Ads will automatically select the call- to-action language to optimize for the best performance. |
Learn about the creative asset quality guidelines for Discovery ads
If you'd like to generate a second set of asset pairings, you can create a new ad later on. The assets you provide in each ad are used interchangeably only within that ad.
Step 2b: Set up your multi-image carousel ad
Select images or Carousel to create your first Discovery ad
- Navigate to your Discovery campaign.
- On the page menu on the left, click Ads & Extensions.
- Click the plus button
- Enter your asset.
Discovery Carousel ad asset specifications
Note: If at least one card is disapproved, the ad status column will be marked as "Approved (limited)" and within 24 hours it will change to "Disapproved". This is a known issue and will be resolved soon. The ad won't serve in this case.
|
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 1 |
Minimum: 3 Maximum: 5 |
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 5 |
|
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 1 |
Minimum: 1 Maximum: 1 |
Optional |
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Maximum: 10 5MB maximum file size Note: all cards must have the same aspect ratio (see combinations below)
|
5MB maximum file size Transparent background recommended |
square, square, square
| Headline (required) |
Your headlines are the first line of your ad. You can enter a headline to align with each image |
| Description (required) |
Your descriptions add to your headline and invite people to take action. You won't be able to write descriptions for each image; instead write descriptions that can be combined with any of your headlines, images and landing page. |
|
Card images |
Ads won't be saved if not all cards have images with the same aspect ratios. Please note that the creative will show cards in the order created and shown in the preview tool.
|
| Logos (required) |
Logos could be rounded off in ad preview and live rendering on some of the properties. Upload logos that combine well with any of your headlines, descriptions and images, and center them. Most common non-.gif formats are accepted. |
| Business Name (required) |
Only one business name can be provided for a single creative. It can be up to 25 characters. |
| Final URL (required) |
Default landing page that customers will reach on clicking the ad. You can provide a specific landing page for each image. |
| Mobile URL (optional) |
Mobile landing page that customers will reach on clicking the ad from a mobile device. |
| Call-to-Action text |
If set to “Automatic”, Google Ads will automatically select the call- to-action language to optimize for the best performance. |
Learn about the creative asset quality guidelines for Discovery ads
Step 2c: Set up your lead forms extension (optional)
Lead form extensions help you generate leads by letting people submit their information in a form directly in your ad. Learn how to implement lead form extensions.
Step 3: Allow 2 weeks for a “Learning” period before making new changes
After you make a change to your bid strategy, there may be minor performance fluctuations as Google Ads optimizes your bids. To indicate this, your bid strategy status may be labeled as “Learning”. You can hover over the status to see why your bid strategy has the “Learning” status. It’s recommended that you allow two weeks for the “Learning” period to elapse before making bidding changes.