Continued improvements to App campaigns

June 15, 2023

Connecting people with the apps they enjoy most has never been more important than today, when billions of users globally have millions of apps to choose from. Built with AI at its core, App campaigns promote your app where users are most likely to engage, including across Google's largest channels, to help you more effectively reach your audience and help users discover new and exciting apps. We are continuing to build and expand App campaigns capabilities to improve reach across channels, offer new insights to bolster your performance, and increase the relevance of ads.

Expand your reach across channels: 

  • We’re investing in new content-forward ad formats across Search, Play, Discover, AdMob and YouTube, including enhanced Call-to-Action on Search and rich lists on Play, with more formats to come.
  • We’ve expanded the ads experience on YouTube Shorts by adding an install overlay to make the app download easier and more contextual for users. To get more value out of this inventory, you should consider uploading more vertical video assets as part of your App campaigns.
  • Similar to the App Discovery experience for general searches on Google Play, we will surface relevant ads at the top of the search results page for app-specific queries later this year, helping developers of all sizes reach their relevant audience during a key moment in their install journey.

Example 1

Example of prominent install CTA on Search

Example ad on Search

Example 2

Example of install overlay on YouTube Shorts

Example ad on YouTube Shorts

Example 3

Updates to app-query experience within Google Play

Example ad on Google Play

 

More tools and insights to bolster your app campaign performance:

  • You can now enable ad group feed filtering, promotional assets and seasonality adjustments to manage peak moments and capture user demand.
  • You can also use actionable insights like optimization score to help improve account-level performance.
  • We’ve rolled out improvements to deferred deep linking (DDL), so you can now attach DDLs at the ad-group level, allowing users to deep link into app experiences that are consistent with the theme of your specific ad-group.
  • We’ve enabled auto install for users who pre-register to reduce install friction, allowing users to access a title the moment it is launched, without having to install it within Google Play.
  • Later this year, we will roll out a new creative testing tool that will allow you to compare the performance of your different video assets. This feature is currently available in beta testing.

 Gif of app campaign UI

Preview of new asset uplift tool

Improve the relevance and quality of App ads:

  • Google Ads has enhanced matching between queries and apps through Dynamic Search Ads, to improve ad relevance and creative automation on Google Search. In the future, we will expand this update to improve overall coverage and quality within automated asset generation, providing a more tailored experience for users.
  • We’ve also improved our Smart Asset Selection models on Google Play, allowing us to dynamically surface your most relevant and best performing assets for a given user or query. 

We will continue to explore new ways to grow reach for our advertiser partners and connect mobile app users with more relevant apps with App campaigns.  

Posted by Carlos Facanha, Director of Product Management, App Ads

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