Google Lightbox Ads and Engagement Campaigns

Key Takeaways

as a PVC marketer I love to use the Google Display Network to build brand awareness and fill the top of my funnel and even though I love that my target audience can see my ad I'm always looking for that subset of users who like to engage with my ads those users who want to click on my ad and go to my website are more likely to eventually come back search for my brand name search for my products and services and those are the ones are going to come back and convert and this is where Google's lightbox ads can really help in this week's video I want to show you how to create an engagement campaign and all the endless combinations of images videos and call to actions and messages that you can create in a lightbox ad that you can put in front of your target user and get them to engage and most likely create another audience set to get those users to come back to your website and convert so let's begin ever since Google Ads started pushing the campaign goals on all advertisers finding out how to set up an engagement ad became a little bit more difficult if you want to run an engagement ad campaign you first must select the product and brand consideration goal then you choose display and then enter in your business website for the most part engagement display campaigns have the same setup as a typical display campaign there's just one major difference I want to make sure that it's called out the only bid strategy we have to choose from is CPE or cost per engagement cost per engagement bidding is pretty much exactly what it sounds like advertisers only have to pay for the ad when a user engages with the ads an engagement occurs when users choose to expand the ad by hovering the mouse over the ad itself and after you have the campaign set up exactly how you want let's go in and look at all the different custom options we have to really make an ad that's going to engage with whatever your target audience may be now for the sake of this video I just pulled a few random images and logos this is a hypothetical ad just to show you all the options that you have the bulk of what an engagement ad is is made up of cards these cards include gallery cards feed cards you can also have a video card which we're gonna go through the main card that you will most likely include in your engagement ad is a gallery card in this particular ad I added five different images or five different types of guitars then I conclude a title of each guitar a description of what the guitar is a call to action for each one as well as a final URL this could be good for ecommerce businesses to send users to those specific product pages even if you were more of a b2b or Li Chen type company or account you can you look at setting up different cards for your different products or services and also send those users to your website or landing pages advertisers can also add product feeds as an optional card you just have to remember to select a product feed from your Merchant Center and that can be found within your campaign settings and if you know me you know I'm a huge fan of YouTube so you can go to YouTube copy the URL whichever video you want to add to your engagement ad open up the video card option and just paste in the URL just below the cards pretty straightforward you have the option to add your logo image as well as the URL of your main website or landing page next you can add up to a total of ten messages or calls to actions now you may be thinking wait didn't we just add these elements in our title cards and potential our video cards well I guess we did but this section of messages and calls to action are for the entire ad not for each image or video card look at these messages our call to actions as a combination of like a promo or call-out extension like you would within your search campaigns what message do you want to put in front of potential customers that can make them want to engage with your ad and learn more about your offers or your products or your services start putting together a list of promos values or offer messages that you want to put in front of a new audience and use this collection as your first message is to test one thing that's important to note is that you can rearrange the order of your messages and calls the action elements and whatever you want the order of which the elements are displayed goes from the sort order from the highest to the lowest so in this ad example the call to action would be shown first and then the messages of 20% of all guitars price match on all items and further and further as we go down this means your most important messages should be at the top of your list when you're setting up each of your engagement ads next we have the name of the ad and the final URL which are pretty typical next and some additional options that we have you can click on more options to add a header image invitation images and potentially customize your own style so we already have header images up there are three sizes where you can add the header image and we can see it in the expanded state example so these are gonna be a good way to potentially call out your brand so I would definitely use these to really have the user understand who you are and what your company is the next additional option we have is invitation images there are three initial sizes required we have the option to add 11 more if you look closely and you see the sizes of each of these images they match the basic image ad sites that you would add to your regular display campaigns to engage with the ad the user has to hover over the engagement ad with their mouths for a couple seconds before the ad expands initially Google will take a preview of the ad as the main image advertisers can add the most common display image ad sizes as the invitation image if you really want to control the experience for the companies out there who are really picky about branding and want to make sure that colors and everything for brand consistency are all in line check out custom styles because here is where you can change the theme the fonts and the colors for your engagement ad as well as the gradient transparency to really match the look and feel of potentially your other marketing campaigns now let's look at one possible way your engagement ad could look to users out on the Display Network here's where a user would hover over the invitation image first we see the gallery cards the user has the option to sort through a few of them and you can see the shop now call to action in the button as well as the messages that we have then the user can go over and look at the video card again this is just one version think if we added a merchant feed to the account as well as additional calls to action different products different messages depending on how many products or pages you want to promote within these ads you have an almost endless options and combinations that you can test to try to engage users to interact with your brand if you know you're honing in on the right audience a basic display network campaign can still be valuable especially if you can get a bunch of free impressions however I'm always trying to look for that user who is most likely to convert and that's where Google lightbox ads can really help think about it what's more valuable someone who's just seen your ad or someone who spends the time to hover over an ad let that ad expand look through a few images watch a video potentially click on a few messages or call to actions right someone who's engaging and spending a ton of time on your ad is going to be a more valuable user and we can use that audience from our lightbox ads to create deeper remarketing audiences from a more engaged user so hopefully this video showed you all the endless combinations that you can create and why you should at least test out lightbox ads for any of your Display Network campaigns to try to get in front of user more likely to come back and convert 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