A Google Responsive Display Ad (RDA) campaign runs what the search engine giant calls responsive ads: display ads capable of automatically adjusting their size and format to fit ad spaces.
In this post
Learn the value of running a Google Responsive Display Ad campaign and how RDA advertising can benefit your business, help you promote your brand, and boost your revenue.
What is a Responsive Display Ad (RDA)?
Responsive Display Ads (RDAs) are one of the many options of other ad formats and other display ads campaigns advertisers can choose to advertise their products, brands, and services with Google Ads.
At first glance, Google Responsive Display Ads appear to be just another responsive display and advertising system for advertisers. However, Google RDAs offer to advertisers a unique value proposition: they are designed to adjust to a given site’s ad spaces automatically using machine learning (ML).
How Do Google RDA Ads Work?
Google RDA will detect the sizes and formats of all available ad spaces on a given website and adapt your responsive ads’ size, appearance, and layout to these other ad formats and slot size beforehand. RDAs eliminate the need for advertisers to create ads and manually adjust creatives to each space.
Ads served through the Google RDA system are created automatically and assembled from individual assets created and uploaded by the advertiser using Google’s machine learning (ML) algorithms. This technology ensures the display ads and videos it creates showcase the best and most appealing elements.
Assets advertisers can upload to Google RDA include:
- Short headlines (30 characters or less)
- Long headlines (up to 90 characters)
- Brand or business name
- Call-to-action (CTA) text
- Product descriptions
- Logos
- Images in square (1:1), landscape format (1.91:1), or portrait format (9:16)
- URLs to video assets
When Google assembles the advertiser’s assets using responsive display ads into a functional display ad, it will create a fully functional display ad designed to fit any screen size with standard Google Display Network display ad size.
Common Google RDA ad formats on desktop websites:
Common Google RDA ad formats on mobile sites and properties:
Top 6 Benefits of Responsive Display Ads for Advertisers
Advertisers choosing to promote their brands, products, and services through Google Responsive Ads (RDAs) may find this advertising method beneficial in six significant ways: ease of setup and configuration, better reach, improved CTRs, enhanced mobile ad performance, better performance monitoring, and better dynamic retargeting.
Understanding how Google RDA can benefit advertisers and what they stand to gain with a well-configured, properly-tuned RDA campaign is crucial to using this platform as efficiently as possible.
1. Fast Setup and Easy to Configure
One of the most immediate benefits of using Google Responsive Ads (RDA) is a fast setup and configuration phase, creating the vast difference in time and effort required to set up an RDA campaign compared to traditional ad campaigns.
The ease of setting up and configuring a campaign is especially beneficial for advertisers with limited access to web designers, dedicated web developers and programmers, and other individuals capable of creating high-quality ad creatives.
The primary advantage of using Google RDA is the convenience of letting Google to automatically create ads, to build and configure your ad creatives. This represents a significant time- and money-saving benefit for many advertisers, as the ad network will automatically create ads, adjust, and place fully functional display ads on their behalf, with little to no manual tuning necessary.
Following the network’s and Google Display Network (GDN) recommendations regarding assets is crucial to obtain the best results with Google RDA. Creating and uploading high-quality assets helps ensure Google’s systems can combine them as efficiently as possible and generate appealing responsive display ads.
Best Practices to Setup Image Assets
Below are some best practices and recommendations advertisers should follow when uploading assets to Google RDA:
- When uploading landscape images, ensure the resolution is a 1.91:1 ratio (1.91 times as wide as they are tall). While the minimum allowed resolution is 600 x 314, the recommendation is to upload images at least twice as large, with a resolution of 1,200 x 628 or better.
- While the minimum size for square image assets is 300 x 300, the recommended size is four times larger or better: 1,200 x 1,200.
- Portrait images are ideal for tall and narrow display ads, such as half-page or wide skyscrapers. Although the minimum allowed size for such assets is 600 x 1,067, consider uploading images at least 1.5 times larger. Google’s recommended size is 900 x 1600.
- Always use the highest-quality images at your disposal. Avoid blurry, hard-to-read, skewed, excessively filtered, or otherwise visually compromised assets.
- Remember that Google’s systems will assemble images, pictures, logos, and text for you. Avoid including images or photographs with text and logo already baked in, as it may result in repeated or visually disruptive logos.
- Upload at least 3 to 5 images for each product you want to be featured on a responsive ad. It helps avoid repetition and ensures ads can efficiently present your product for all GDN display ad sizes.
- When uploading product images, ensure they fully showcase the product with less than 20% of blank space around it. It helps ensure your products remain within the generated display ad’s focus without issues.
2. Better Reach
The primary benefit of using Google Responsive Display Ads is the possibility of generating quality display ads, responsive display advertising that can fit in any ad space using any standard GDN format. In specific instances, Google RDA can also let you benefit from advanced features, such as adapting your own assets to create text-based ads, auto-generated video content, and native ads.
These features are convenient for advertisers looking to use their assets in a wide variety of ad types and formats. Consequently, RDA ads are an efficient solution to maximize the reach and visibility of their ad campaigns, ensuring brands, products, and services are promoted on the most digital properties possible and to the broadest target audiences.
For example, an advertiser looking to promote sportswear products can upload assets to Google RDA and let the system automatically determine the best display ads for digital properties such as lifestyle blogs, fashion websites, sports-focused social media platforms, and high-relevancy mobile applications. This solution lets the advertiser reach audiences from all these sites in different combinations and platforms, maximizing visibility.
3. Improved Click-Through Rates (CTRs)
Advertisers using Google RDA and optimizing their ad campaigns by following the network’s best practices and asset recommendations generally see the best measurable results.
RDA campaigns built using sufficient high-quality, high-resolution assets experience the best engagement rates, increasing click-through rates (CTRs) and contributing to boosted conversions and revenue.
Additionally, a well-tuned Google RDA campaign typically performs better than most traditional display ad campaigns. The performance difference is partly due to Google’s machine learning (ML) algorithms automatically testing, evaluating, and optimizing each new ad variation it creates.
Leveraging Google RDA’s functions and capabilities helps advertisers ensure only the best-performing versions of Google display ads are displayed on each website, blog, app, or digital property reached.
4. Enhanced Performance for Mobile Ad Serving
Another significant benefit of using Google RDA to serve ads is improving your ad campaign’s performance on mobile devices and digital properties.
Advertisers must create assets specifically for mobile ads when running traditional ad campaigns, with few avenues to reuse or recycle the same assets and content. Developing mobile-friendly assets can be time-consuming and expensive, especially for smaller advertisers with fewer resources.
With Google RDA, this constraint is eliminated. Google’s machine-learning algorithms will adjust the size unlimited placement and format of the ads it creates to fit mobile-friendly ad spaces on different devices without requiring you to create new or mobile-specific assets.
5. Individual Element Performance Monitoring
When using Google RDA to manage your ad campaigns, you can monitor the performance of each element and asset your ads use with the ad asset report function.
Google RDA monitoring systems compare asset performance in relation to other assets of the same type. For example, headlines are only compared to other headlines, whereas product descriptions can only be compared to other product descriptions.
One of the most critical elements of the ad asset report is the Performance column. This function is where you can monitor the performance of your assets and determine which ones contribute to your ad campaign’s success. Each asset receives a performance rating, indicating how much it contributes to your campaign’s overall performance.
Optimizing your assets to ensure they receive the best ratings is essential to boost click-throughs, conversions, and revenue, increasing your ad campaign’s overall performance.
Google RDA tracks asset performance using six ratings: Pending, Learning, Low, Good, Best, and Unrated. Here’s what each rating means:
- Pending: Assets with the Pending performance rating do not currently have any performance metrics that Google can use to measure its performance. It typically appears on new or unused assets.
- Learning: Google assigns this rating to assets with some data already collected but doesn’t have enough to provide a definitive rating. According to Google RDA guidelines, assets with a Learning rating must have collected at least 5,000 impressions over 30 days to obtain a different rating.
- Low: Google assigns this performance rating to the worst-performing assets in a given category. Google recommends replacing assets rated Low with others to improve your ad campaign’s overall performance.
- Good: This performance rating is equivalent to a Medium rating, between Low and Best. Google recommends optimizing this asset or adding more of the same type for your campaign to improve its overall performance.
- Best: This is the highest performance rating, shown on assets with the best performance for its type. Advertisers should strive to ensure as many of their assets have this rating. Google recommends adding more assets with similar attributes to boost the ad campaign’s performance.
- Unrated: The asset performance tracker will show a pair of dash symbols (–) to indicate an asset is currently Unrated. Three possible symptoms can cause an asset to be Unrated: Not enough assets of the same type to compare it with, the asset is inactive, or the asset doesn’t receive enough web traffic to measure its relative performance accurately.
6. Ideal for Dynamic Retargeting and Prospecting
Dynamic retargeting, also known as dynamic remarketing, is a retargeting system provided by Google Ads to help advertisers show relevant ads to users and viewers that have previously visited a website or used a specific mobile application.
Unlike standard remarketing, Google’s dynamic retargeting system automatically captures user data to show tailored ads, letting viewers see promoted products and services they’ve browsed while visiting the website or app.
Ads served through Google RDA are designed to function alongside Google’s dynamic retargeting function, automatically adjusting the ads displayed to retargeted users by using the assets corresponding to the products and services they browsed or viewed before.
This strategy makes it a highly effective tool for advertisers looking to reduce cart abandonment rates and convince previous visitors to purchase a product or convert.
Google Ads also allows advertisers to add dynamic prospecting to a dynamic retargeting campaign. Dynamic prospecting lets Google RDA use its machine learning (ML) algorithm to predict what a user is likely to purchase or be interested in based on what the customer is browsing and demographics data, such as age, gender, or income.
In practice, dynamic prospecting displays highly targeted ads using similar principles as dynamic retargeting but toward users visiting for the first time, letting you benefit from Google’s ML-powered systems for first-time and returning visitors.
Build an Efficient and High-Performing RDA Campaign with CodeFuel
Although starting an ad campaign with Google Responsive Display Ads (RDA) is fast and easy, one of the more challenging aspects of managing an RDA campaign is ensuring you have high-quality assets for Google’s systems to use. If you need assistance creating, modifying, and optimizing assets to ensure they receive the highest performance ratings, CodeFuel is here to help.
Leverage the skills and resources of our digital advertising team and let our experts help you create ads with high-quality assets and find the best ways to monetize your digital property. We are committed to ensuring your business’s growth and the performance of your ad campaigns. Contact CodeFuel today to get started.
