Ads have to be more than just visually engaging. Integrating AI into Google Display Ads promises dedicated B2B experiences to foster conversions.

In 2024, the general audience has an attention deficit. Due to a never-ending content carousel, they are also weary and overstimulated. Advertisements are also part of this content.

How many ads are perceived in the way businesses intend them to? Most of the few-second ads on YouTube, Spotify, or Instagram meet with irritation, skip options, or users buying the premium version to avoid them.

Well, it works seemingly well, right? Create a problem and offer a solution. But this is a user’s perspective.

Today, according to Statista, a consumer spends an average of 6 hours 36 minutes on the internet daily. Every six out of 10 people use the internet to search. Of course, they are tired of irrelevant content that doesn’t suit their interests.

However, this is only one side of the coin. Relevant content targeting the right audience can do wonders for a business. Thus, for brands, the internet works quite differently. They leverage attention deficiency and the time spent glued to their screens.

First, Instagram introduced Reels, and now we have unskippable ads on reels and not merely on our feed. Visually engaging content has become the go-to.

Advertisements have always been about being visually appealing.

Even when they come in different formats now than ever before, advertisers know how to appeal to our nostalgia. We are fascinated by giant billboards, posters, video ads, and eccentric advertising campaigns that intrigue us.

Mailchimp worked on a mispronunciation “Did you mean MailChimp?” advertising campaign.

In 2014, Mailchimp had a crime podcast called Serial, for which they recorded pre-roll audio ads. The participants (voice actors) were anonymous. One mispronounced the brand’s name to say, “Mail Kimp.”

Mailchimp’s marketing team was motivated. They embraced this mispronunciation to create one of their most successful campaigns. It was a play on fake names, such as NailChamp and KaleLimp, but with a similar pronunciation to Mailchimp’s.

These were turned into pre-roll YouTube and display ads across billboards, subway stations, and Instagram posts. These adverts got them awareness and traffic.

Their marketing angle? Creativity and curiosity.

With little to no information on their display ads regarding the actual brand, curiosity played a crucial role in this innovative and successful campaign. Display ads contributed significantly to creating intrigue, i.e., it worked as a medium.

How Google display ads work.

They hold the same significance as traditional advertisements. However, it is more convenient to reach them when potential customers spend hours on the Internet.

Google Display Network (GDN) bolsters your reach and directs more eyes towards your ads. Its practicality and advantage for your business depend on the marketing objectives. If one of them is a cost-effective ad campaign, GDN can be an effective and seamless highway to foster brand awareness.

GDN reaches over 90% of the audience online and comprises over 3 million websites, videos, and 650,000 apps.

They advertise because they want visibility and awareness – simple and sweet. But advertising is not just shooting with a blindfold on (or is it?). It requires understanding your audience and narrowing it down to your target audience, broadening your customer base, and elevating conversion rates.

One of its advantages for the B2B world is how display campaigns through Google Display Network reach prospects at different stages of the buying cycle: ones that hold no interest to those who are ready to purchase. Because the network reaches numerous websites and platforms, it targets diverse audiences, even those not actively searching for your products.

GDN serves ads to such content websites and blogs that have at least one of your relevant and target keywords.

How is Google Search Network different from Google Display Ads?

Provided above are two different types of Google ads – Search and Display ads. It is visible in their short descriptions that Search ads help drive traffic and sales for those “actively” searching for your products, whereas Display ads reach the general audience, whether or not they are interested in your services.

The Google Search Network (GSN) reaches those actively searching for products or services. For example, in the above screenshot, we search for “email marketing services”, and the first two results that Google gives us have sponsored ads for email marketing by Selzy and Zoho.

Search ads are provided according to the keyword or keywords in the user’s search phrase, which in the above case was “email marketing” and are text-based and driven by intent. The search phrase used here is commercial, i.e., the user has purchasing intent but requires further research to confirm the buy.

Display Ad intent Vs Search Ads Intent

Hence, this is one of the reasons that they have higher CPC. When users search for something specific, especially similar products and services, using high-value keywords, this intensifies the advertiser’s bids due to more competition. This increases cost-per-click (CPC) as keyword targeting focuses on high intent demonstrated by the users.

The bids determine the ad cost. The higher the keyword value and search value, the higher the advertisers bid against each other, driving the CPC or PPC.

Why is this such an important metric? CPCs determine the ROI and measure the performance of your ads. You bid on a specific keyword for Search ads or placement for Display ads that are relevant to you. And then your ad appears whenever a browser uses that keyword, just as Zoho and Selzy ads above.

As an advertiser, you don’t pay for anything unless someone clicks on your ad. The amount depends on the maximum bid, keyword value, and ad quality. Zoho’s ad campaign above is well-curated because it conveys to its potential users that they are a simple platform without any hassles.

They highlight email marketing features for beginners and resources to streamline and optimize those already undertaking email marketing campaigns alongside a discount plan, demonstrating cost-effectiveness.

These Search ads will definitely map and guide the users toward what they seek, due to which they have a higher click-through rate (CTR).

The CPC principle works similarly for Display Ads. The targeting is effected through target audiences and websites. The purpose here is different – instead of attempting to capture high-intent prospects, the goal is brand awareness.

In the above example for the ZeroGPT website, three different display ads are visible – Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a featured video for Adobe, and other ads for Sendbird AI chatbot for WordPress.

These ads don’t pop up when you search for a phrase on Google’s search bar but appear when you visit a website. This is how Display ads work.

Through these ads, you are not merely limited to the results page.

Instead, the Google Display Network allows you to define the audience differently than one can do through search ads.

Audience segmentation is a huge factor in Google Ads, helping your brand reach just the right audience (along with newer ones who might have conversion potential). While creating a Google ad campaign, you can select any audience segment based on demographics, interests, intent, etc.

The audience here is determined based on third-party website activities and Google products. The data used to segment the audiences accordingly is based significantly on page visit histories and past searches.

Audience Segmentation Types

According to Google, there are seven audience segmentation types available for Display Ads campaigns:

In-market segments

Targeting this audience segment is basically middle-of-the-funnel marketing: advertisers want to elevate brand awareness and boost “consideration for in-market audiences”. These prospects are already researching the solutions you offer and actively considering buying something similar across the browsing pages.

When can you choose in-market audience targeting? There are three purposes:

• Guiding potential leads down the funnel
• When the leads are researching and can be swayed with the right offer
• Reach prospects beyond the first-party lists

For example, if you provide email marketing services, you can focus your ad on the in-market segment, researching how to optimize their emails.

Audience affinities

This includes audiences who have a high affinity or are highly enthusiastic about the products you may be offering. Audiences segmented according to their interests, lifestyles, and hobbies can be based on both contextual and personalized signals or only contextual signals.

While attributing the audience to your ad campaign or ad group, Google will offer tags on its own, but it is crucial to research further and outline the audience best suited for your brand.

Why do affinity audience options work?

It’s simple. When you advertise your solutions to those highly likely to have interests, lifestyles, and habits in alignment with what your brand is selling, conversion potential is also high. This directly impacts the ROI by propelling conversions and making ad campaigns more cost-effective. They specify and narrow the market targets, decreasing the gap between how much you spend on ads and what you receive in return.

Custom-intent keyword segments

This option for audience segmentation offers more precise targeting. While the affinity audience option entails 80 groups you can choose from currently, custom segmentation lets you choose.

It lets you choose the perfect segment by letting you include URLs, keywords, and apps related to your solutions. This option targets a more niche audience.

Rather than selecting one of the options under affinity audience segment, specify using keywords that your targeted audience is likely to search, i.e., create customized segments. The system then chooses the right segment based on your bidding strategy and ad goals, focusing on one of the following – reach, performance and consideration.

After this, Google Ads showcases display ads for those interested in these keywords across apps, videos, and web pages.

Custom-intent segments

This specific option focuses on ad placement. By allowing you to define the ideal audience, you can choose between placing the ad on a particular vertical or landing page.

Which audiences should see the ads and where? It’s a thorough process.

Adoption of AI & Google Ads transformation.

With the help of AI, targeting, formatting, and bidding have been optimized.

Now, display campaigns in Google Display Network have improved their campaign performance using AI capabilities:

Smart Bidding

They use contextual signals or machine learning algorithms to gauge predictions about how different bid amounts. The signals here are identifiable attributes of a person or the context.

The context could entail a location. Imagine the advertiser’s campaign isn’t rooted in a chosen geography. Google Ads optimizes the bid according to the specific city someone is based in, or specific ad version and whether it’s been shown on the mobile app. The bid will be adjusted depending on the version (ad format and size) that is most likely to convert.

But the overall revenue depends on your smart bidding strategies. AI capabilities embedded within smart bidding streamline the methods with your business goal – whether it is to receive maximum conversions or customer actions, increase return ad spend, or optimize the visibility of your ad (when and where) based on real-time search data by studying the potential of a conversion who is actively searching the products/services you are advertising.

Overall once your strategies and goals are in order, Google Ads will attempt to equate conversion value per cost with the return on ad spend set.

How does the asset upload and ad generation process work?

•  When you upload the assets, AI interprets the perfect combination between each asset and the ad slot. This depends on how your ads have fared before.
•  Google Ads adjusts the size, appearance, and format of the ad per asset type to fit it into the available space. A display ad may be shown as a banner ad on one hand and a dynamic text ad on the other.
• Sometimes videos can perform better, and even Google Ads might think so!

By optimizing and streamlining the ad assets to drive results, Google can offer personalized content managed by your feed. They can offer the products the user was looking at in the ad.

The last step is measuring ad performance by mapping any of the following actions taken by the browser: clicks to sign up, making a purchase, or requesting a quote.

Google Analytics for ad tracking plays a huge role here.

Choose Google Analytics view after linking your Google Ads to the same to pinpoint the site engagement metrics. It will also illustrate user actions after clicking on your ad and reaching the landing page. It would comprise bounce rates, average session duration, number of pages per session, and first-time sessions.

To analyze the performance of your ad campaign, you should consistently monitor the performance of the ads. A thorough analysis can help boost your efforts and optimize and improve the Google Ad.

Monitoring impressions and clicks is half of the story.

The created ad impacts your potential conversions, especially if you want them to perform a specific action on the website, phone, or app.

First, you can monitor the conversions quite easily. A “Conversion” column on the left menu section highlights the number of conversions received, i.e. the number of different valuable actions your targeted audience performed corresponding to the ad.

Second, check the quality score, after all, quality matters over quantity. Google Analytics uses a metric that estimates how your placement, keywords, landing page, and ads are to the audience watching it. According to Google, more relevant ads that are fine-tuned for your audience segment earn more clicks and appear in higher positions, increasing brand visibility.

Third, link your brand’s Google Ads account to Google Analytics. The reports will offer you the post-click ad metrics for users who performed the click and then visited your website or installed your app. They also entail comprehensive user data that outlines conversion patterns and user behavior after acquisition.

Attracting the right customers is not challenging. Bear in mind the simple things first before even coming to analyze the performance of your ad campaign: whether the ad copy is relevant and compelling, are your targeting and bidding budget and methods optimized, and whether you have included/excluded particular locations, etc.

What is next for Google Display Ads?

With modern tech optimizing and enhancing Google Ads performance, how can Google Display Ads take a step forward to be even more of an asset for the B2B world?

Engaged-view conversions. Integrating video advertising capabilities with the benefits of display ads.

The full impact of your ads is beyond the number of clicks. And this works quite well on video ads. Engaged view-conversions are when the user watches at least 10 seconds of a skippable ad or the entire ad if it’s less than 10 seconds or five seconds of a Shorts ad on YouTube.

Google says that the prospect takes action only after the entire live-viewing experience is completed. This says a lot about your advertising and how it stays with the potential customer. It asserts that your ad was placed in their memory, keeping them engaged.

As viewing habits change along with the devices, engaged-view conversions illustrate high user engagement and how the AdTech industry is catching up with evolving user habits.

This also signifies the value of your ads, and whether your budget is even half the effort.