How do you advertise online through banners using Google Ads?

Banners created for online advertising will be displayed on Google partner sites, and by using them you can direct users to your site and encourage them to act in a certain way you want them to (buy a product, subscribe to your newsletter, etc.). You can promote a new or existing product, get your brand recognized or enhance your image.

Banner advertising can be thought of as a deal involving three entities: you – the advertiser who wants to promote your business, Google and the website owners – who display ads through the AdSense system and want to be paid for the space they have made available to you.

Banner formats and types

The banners you can promote through Google Ads can be non-animated, animated or flash. Since the owners of the sites hosting your ads decide where on the site the Google Ads ads will be displayed and what size they will be, it is good to know that there are the following formats:

• mobile leaderboard: 320 x 50 (only available for non-animated images)
• banner: 468 x 60
• leaderboard: 728 x 90
• square: 250 x 250
• small square: 200 x 200
• large rectangle: 336 x 280
• inline rectangle: 300 x 250
• skyscraper: 120 x 600
• wide skyscraper: 160 x 600
• half-page: 300 x 600
• large leaderboard: 970×90.

However, if you don’t want to invest a lot of time and money in creating banners available in all the formats listed, you can limit yourself to the most used ones. From SEMsphere’s experience we can say that these include:

• inline rectangle: 300 x 250
• wide skyscraper: 160 x 600
• leaderboard: 728 x 90.

To make sure you get maximum exposure, you should use banners in all the formats mentioned.

File size and animation duration

Another Google requirement for publishing banners is related to file size. Until recently this was a maximum of 50 KB. Now Google has increased the value to 150 KB, which helps especially those who want to promote themselves through flash banners. The duration of the animation must also be respected. In the case of banners containing it, it must not exceed 30 seconds.

Correct choice of target audience

In addition to the essential requirements outlined above, in order to record the desired performance by running such a campaign you need to make sure that you have chosen the correct keywords and sites where the ads will be displayed (called manual placement destinations).

According to Google, choosing keywords for a display network campaign is like finding the right match for a friend.

The choice of keywords will be made according to the specifics of your business and you should select words that are related to the sites your potential customers might visit. It is important to know that these words will be searched by the system in the various sites that accept Google Ads ads, and the system will display ads where it considers that the site “talks” about it.

Another important point is the choice of placement destinations. If you don’t know which sites might bring you customers, you can choose either keywords or categories of sites (topics) according to which your banners should be displayed. For example, if you own an online shop with kitchen robots and you want to promote it, you will choose from the list of categories of sites that have content about cooking and recipes.

After a while, you can analyze the data and draw conclusions about which sites performed and which didn’t and include those that brought you customers as manual placement destinations.

Besides these options you can choose to display banners depending on what interests your users. Just select the interest category you consider appropriate and the system will display the ads to people who might be interested in that category. It’s like making a profile of your potential customer. For example, you own a sports shop and want to promote tennis rackets through Google Ads. To reach your target audience you would select tennis lovers from the list of interest categories.

Another tool that can help you reach customers using banners is remarketing. With remarketing you can get users who have visited your site and not purchased to follow up on any site they visit and come back to you to purchase your product. Read more about remarketing here.