During Google Marketing Live 2022, the Google Ads teams insisted on the Assets of advertiser accounts. And there is nothing surprising in this: the library of advertising elements is set to become a central performance factor for the campaigns broadcast on the platform.
Moreover, innovations in this area are accelerating: from the brand-new library, to the announcement of a future automatic creation of advertising elements that will use the content of landing pages to produce optimized responsive ads, passing through the new asset formats for YouTube or the increasingly advanced integrations available via the API.
But it is not necessary to wait for more innovations to realize the obvious: Google Ads assets are already a powerful lever (if not the most powerful) to increase the rate of conversion of your ads, the volume of sales and therefore necessarily your ROAS on the entire Alphabet network.
In the context of the various smart campaigns (in particular the Performance Max campaigns), which represent an increasingly large part of the advertisers’ budget, the optimization of this library is essential today. Beyond the many settings to optimize your Google Ads campaigns, a few hours spent on your “blog optimization services” can make a real difference in your performance.
So here are the areas on which we advise you to focus to improve your assets and increase your KPIs.
Summary
- Text, Image, Video and HTML5: take advantage of the different types of Google Ads Assets
- Tailor your library assets to your advertising goals
- Diversify to reign better (even when it is not mandatory)
- Make regular updates to replace poorly performing Assets
- Focus on the quality of your creations
- Pay attention to “Mobile” users
- Feed your Assets with relevant audience signals
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Which type of Google Ads assets is most effective?
- What’s most important about building a Google Ads asset library?
- How can I find inspiration for my Google Ads assets?
Text, Image, Video and HTML5: take advantage of the different types of Google Ads Assets
Google Ads Assets are bricks. You make them available to the platform’s AI to assemble into different ad types, across Alphabet’s inventory. However, given the permanent diversification of this inventory, the advertising formats and the resulting opportunities are increasingly varied.
You would therefore be wrong to limit yourself to a single type of ad, considering that you have no place in certain formats. The interest of the Assets approach is precisely to allow you to test the full range of possibilities available to you and to index your strategic decisions on real results.
In order to help the AI compose the best combinations of advertising elements to promote your offer, we therefore invite you not to be stingy with creations of all kinds:
- Texts (titles and descriptions)
- Videos
- Pictures and logos
- HTML5 groups (galleries, carousels, buttons)
All assets uploaded to an ad group’s assets may be combined for ad serving in that ad group based on channel-specific needs. An extra text, image or video can make a difference in performance. So, be generous with content and give Google Ads the means to test your offer by using all the power of the campaigns.
Tailor your library assets to your advertising goals
Expanding your use of different ad element formats is a good thing. But online advertising, however automated it may be, is first and foremost advertising. To achieve your goals, your ads must therefore convey a message that is relevant to your marketing target.
By using the principle of segmentation of your ads wisely, you must therefore adapt the content of each asset to the objective of the ad group in which it fits. This involves considering both the group’s position in your sales funnel and the characteristics of the audience to which the group’s ads should be shown. Inevitably, you will not broadcast the same message within the framework of a group of retargeting ads for abandoned carts and within the framework of a group of ads intended to develop notoriety with cold prospects…
If you need to take stock of the different stages of your current strategy, our Google Ads experts are available to provide you with a personalized diagnosis:
In any case, you will have to go through the copywriting box to align the creations of your different groups of assets with your strategic objectives. And, if you don’t know how to approach this particular discipline, we advise you to take a look at our article on the 3 “Ps” necessary for good copywriting.
By the way, a little trick, you can use the ad preview tool to see if the different possible combinations of assets convey the right message.
Diversify to reign better (even when it is not mandatory)
We told you about it in the introduction: over time, more and more Google Ads assets will be generated automatically, in particular from the content of your landing pages. However, advertisers who have set up a Merchant Center feed already benefit from automatic assets for their Performance Max campaigns. They are therefore not obliged to create their own advertising elements to allow the distribution of their ads and to promote the products of their store.
That said, it would still be a shame not to. Even if it means being a little insistent, we can never repeat enough that the diversification of formats and creations is a powerful asset for giving the AI the means to optimize your campaigns as well as possible. Maximizing the diversity of your advertising elements means maximizing the distribution and performance of your campaigns on all Google Ads properties, especially when it is not mandatory.
The maximum number of assets allowed is 4 for text and 20 for other asset types. And, guess what, Google recommends stocking up to stream in the best conditions across all channels…
Make regular updates to replace poorly performing Assets
Using all the available assets does not mean that new assets should not be injected regularly. On the contrary, it is recommended, while remaining at the maximum number authorized, to regularly delete the elements which obtain the least good results in order to test new elements in their place.
To do this, you need to keep an eye on the asset report for each ad group at all times. Once an asset is no longer in the learning phase, it automatically switches to the label “weak”, “satisfactory” or “excellent”. The idea is therefore to use this evaluation to optimize your library of elements by gradually replacing those that underperform with assets inspired by those that outperform.
By doing so, you should be able to get a better return on your advertising spend fairly quickly.
Focus on the quality of your creations
Beyond the relevance of your copywriting, the formal and ethical quality of your advertising elements can also impact their performance. To increase the number of “excellent” assets in your element libraries, you must therefore pay attention to this aspect.
Each of your assets contributes to the brand image of your company and to the definition of your online identity with the public. It is therefore up to you not to display lower quality content in this way, which you would not display, for example, on your website. Your Google Ads ads are a direct extension of your site and all of your online branding materials. This is how they will be perceived by any Google user who is exposed to them after entering an online search.
In the field of Search Ads, it is sometimes tempting, to increase the click rate, to resort to persuasion techniques. In itself, this is not a bad thing. But these techniques must not become subterfuges to deceive the user.
Copywriting is not intended to produce “clickbait”, but to put persuasion at the service of a real value proposition. It is therefore a quality bias that must condition the work of creating your advertising elements.
Pay attention to “Mobile” users
“Mobile” users now represent the majority of Internet users. Depending on your targeting, they can be very well represented in your audiences and this is especially true if your ads are shown on mobile applications. Your advertising assets must therefore include this parameter.
Each of your elements must be able to be viewed on a smartphone or tablet in optimal conditions. And, when your assets include HTML5 groups, these must of course be optimized taking into account the interactions that users in mobile mode can have with web content: pressure on the screen, swiping, drag and drop, zoom in pinching with two fingers…
In other words, it is not only the responsive dimension of your advertising elements that must become an essential criterion, but the taking into account of the overall practices of current users.
Feed your Assets with relevant audience signals
Audience signals are not assets per se, but they are downloadable at the asset level of each ad group. And, although optional, they are essential. Because they make it possible to better orient the machine learning models applied to a campaign. You, therefore, have everything to gain by facilitating and accelerating the learning of the AI by providing it with concrete examples of conversions extracted from your own customer data.
In a context of increasing automation of Marketing for Electricians, everything related to strategic orientations is gaining in importance, because this is what will allow you to make a difference with other advertisers. The human scope resides in these levers of manual intervention, of which audience signals are a part.
Moreover, if you need to take a step back, we have published articles on these crucial issues of mastering Google Ads automation tools and the limits of its algorithm.
