Google recently announced that legacy Google Remarketing templates are going away. They will stop running in November 2019.
Responsive display ads are Google’s way of forcing creative diversity. They’ve found that if you serve impressions to the same user in different formats in the right combinations it gets more clicks.
Responsive display works using principles persuasive psychology called anchoring and chunking. Anchoring is centering all the various creative around one familiar thing, such as a brand or product. Chunking is giving the user smaller bites of information over multiple impressions.
Website visitors are extremely good at ignoring ads. Banner blindness is a life skill we all develop to drown out some of the noise. Once we glance at an ad and decide to ignore it, we can often competently ignore it for limitless impressions.
Anchoring and Chunking can beat banner blindness. When we are glancing at the new ad, the anchor (brand or product) is familiar and interesting enough for us to pay a little bit of attention. That becomes an opportunity to present a chunk of information. Each ad gives us a bit of information that is digestible in a moment. Responsive ads provide the kind of creative diversity necessary to beat banner blindness.
The sequence might start with a text ad on the display network, and then cycle through other formats such as lifestyle or product grids. Building familiarity over time, leading us to click.
The problem with Google Responsive Display ads is that they look terrible. So terrible that they can hurt your brand presentation. There is just no way a machine learning algorithm can figure out how you want your logo to look in relation to your product. Responsive ads don’t care that you spent a month building out your style guide.
That’s where Google Web Designer comes in. GWD can make ads that look exactly the way the brand wants them to look. Ad development has become a specialization, much like front end web development. It’s 25% design and 75% implementation.
We wrote a course on GWD to help kickstart your process on Udemy. If you’d like to get in touch to see if we can make the ads for you, or just to talk about the possibilities of GWD please get in touch.
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