Rich Media Display Ad Best Practices

We've created this guide to help you build an effective display ad for the best results. Try following the recommendations below if you're not sure how to organize your ad campaign, or you want to improve your display ad performance.

1: Set effective bids and budgets

This step is important to help you maximize your impression volume and clicks.

You may want to bid more competitively for your display ad to help it appear in top positions and gain clicks, or focus more on increasing your impressions for branding rather than earning clicks. There are two main approaches you could take:

Add display ads to an existing ad group

Your ads will compete directly with the text ads in that ad group, and the stronger performer will eventually be shown more often. The benefit of this approach is that you don't have to re-create ad groups for a new ad format. However, the bids you've previously set for your text ads in the same ad group will also apply to the display ads as well.

Create display ads in their own unique ad group

It's important to note that, although display ads compete alongside text ads in the ad auction, you won't necessarily pay more when using this ad format. In fact, you may find that your costs per click and costs per conversion actually decrease. This happens because your display ads may earn a higher clickthrough rate than your text ads, earning an improved Quality Score and Ad Rank over time. Your ad may therefore appear more often at lower costs, to encourage more relevant ads for users and improve their web experience. Placing your display ads in their own ad group also makes it easier for you to review their performance.

For example, let's say your business is travel and leisure with a strong focus on cheaper travel in Asia, and a lesser focus on cheaper travel in South America. You could target more of your budget for display ads to a campaign with one ad group promoting cheaper travel in Asia, and create a second campaign and ad group with a lower budget promoting cheaper travel in South America.

Going farther with the example, if you have both ad groups in the same campaign, you might set a higher maximum bid for one ad group versus the other. If your business is focused mainly on cheaper travel in Asia, the more aggressive bidding for these ads will cause them to appear more prominently on content pages than your ads for cheaper travel in South America. This helps you more effectively target your ad budget to the most important ads for your business, so you spend your ad dollars where they matter most to you. (You can also set a unique bid at the ad group level for a specialized ad group, or for each keyword within the ad group.)