Creating a dedicated app for your business is one strategy for increasing revenue and engagement with a target audience. If you can get your audience to use a mobile app instead of searching on their mobile browser, you’ve essentially shut the door on your competition. For example, Amazon and eBay prefer it when users search for products via their apps. They don’t have to worry about customers seeing competing offers from other platforms. With so much at stake, it’s understandable that marketers spend a lot of time and money promoting their apps. Google Ads is expanding its app ad placement options to include spots on prominent Google properties.
Having an app developed can be expensive, and the effort is wasted in no one downloads the app. You can promote the app on your website, but it helps to advertise it to your target consumer so you can increase the size of your audience. Google Ads ap campaigns will appear in more places across Google’s network, such as the Discover feed and YouTube.
The biggest news is having Google Ads app campaigns shown on the Discover feed. The Discover feed is what you see when you first open the Google Search app on a mobile device. It contains a list of recent news articles and other content that you might find interesting, based on previous searches and browsing habits. With the new update from Google, app ads will be shown to users on the Discover feed if they are in the advertiser’s target audience.
This change will significantly increase the exposure app ads get on the platform. Google has reported that the Discover Feed has 800 million active monthly users. With such a large user base, marketers and advertisers are nearly guaranteed to get their app ad seen by their target consumer.
The new Discover feed placement option is already available in the U.S. and will soon come to markets in Malaysia, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and Indonesia. Google expects to complete its global rollout of the feature by the end of the year.
Google is also expanding the ways that app ads can be seen on YouTube. Currently, relevant app ads will be shown in the YouTube search results. However, Google is adding ways to include app ads with the skippable in-stream ads that play before, during, or after the video.
These changes are significant enough, but there may be more new app ad placement options on the way. Google hinted at making it possible for app ads to appear while another app is loading.
In their announcement, Google wrote, “Our new app open ad format allows you to show ads to your users as they wait for your app to load. Designed to seamlessly integrate with your app’s branding, this format gives you new ways to earn revenue while creating a good user experience. Reach out to your account manager to get started with this format in alpha.”
For more recent news about changes to Google Ads, read this article on Google making YouTube masthead ads available to all advertisers.