Display Ad Formats in Google AdWords

Google AdWords offers a large variety of formats to choose from for your ads. AdWords guides you through the process of building your ads, trying to make it as easy as possible to create ads that work for your campaign. When working in the Google AdWords platform, you will see that there are two different ways to create ads for your display campaign. You can either create a responsive ad directly inside the Adwords interface, or you can upload previously created image ads.

Responsive Ads

Responsive ads are ads that automatically adjust their size, appearance, and format to fit available ad space.
Most of the ads have images, but they could also adjust to just show text. Responsive ads are very easy to create in Google AdWords. AdWords walks you through the process, in which you have to provide an image and logo for your ad, and you write the text you would like to see appear in your ad. AdWords then does all the rest, adjusting the size and appearance of your ad, depending on where the ad appears.

Responsive ads in display campaigns are similar to search ads in that they also have two headlines and a description, as well as a final URL. The major difference is that you will need to upload an image. Another difference is that display ads can only support three types of ad extensions: call, location, and affiliate location extensions.

Responsive ads will automatically adjust to fit different formats and screens across different websites. As a result, the display ads on mobile do not need to be created for mobile specifically.

Image Ads

You can choose to upload ads that you have created already (e.g. when you work with an agency, or when you want to create something a little more advanced). AdWords refers to these ads as Image Ads. These ads are not responsive, so you will need to provide various ads that can accommodate different sizes and formats. When you upload ads yourself, you can create ads in different formats. The ad formats you can choose to upload are:

• non-animated image ads
• animated image ads
• HTML5 ads

You can find more instructions here on how to work with each of these formats.

If you happen to be working with a designer or an agency, they are able to help you with the creation of these ads. However, if you would like to try your hand at creating one of the rich media ads that you found in the Rich Media Ad Gallery, you can take advantage of Google Web developer, which is free to download. With this tool, you can find templates for each of the rich media ad formats, and create your ads using Google’s Web Designer software. If you choose to go this route, you can upload these ads into AdWords later.

Gmail Ads

There is one ‘special case’ for display advertising to keep in mind. If you select that you want your display campaign to appear in Gmail, you will need to create special Gmail-only ads. They have a very similar setup to responsive ads - you will need a headline (only 1 this time), a section for a description, a final URL, and an image asset. Additionally, just like other display ads, you are also able to implement ad extensions into these Gmail ads - call, location, and affiliate location extensions.