What type of advertising should you choose on Google Ads?

When you want to launch a promotional campaign via Google Ads, you will need to choose the type of advertising to implement. Each type serves different objectives.

There are 7 in total — let us take a quick look at their respective characteristics:

Search network

This is the oldest and most widely used ad type on the Google Ads platform. This method allows your ads to appear online in a relatively prominent way, as your adverts are displayed on the Google search engine and its partners. In most cases, it remains the most effective approach for ensuring visibility and satisfactory results (provided your campaigns are well set up, of course).

Search network campaigns offer several clear advantages:

Targeted reach (geographic, demographic, by profile, language, etc.)
Quickly qualified traffic if keywords are precise and relevant
An ad structure that allows optimisation (headlines, descriptions, etc.)
Extensions that offer greater visibility
The ability to have ads that genuinely correspond to the landing page (essential for the quality score, incidentally)
Automatically calculated CPCs (and it is indeed advisable to follow these indications, especially for small budgets)

Display network

Through the display network, your adverts will appear on websites, platforms, applications, or videos that have a more or less indirect connection to the theme of your advertising.

The advantages:

Ads can be text-based or image-based (photo, video, etc.)
The choice of themes (which results in less precise targeting, but can be interesting as people seeing the ads may genuinely be interested in them)
The choice of sites on which to display your ads
Some demographic data (age, gender, etc.)

Shopping

A very important section if you run an online shop. Google Shopping uses the photos and product descriptions from your e-commerce site to showcase them on the search engine — like a window display, but virtual.

Internet users can then find your products alongside those of your competitors. They will refine their searches based on criteria such as price, appearance, and so on.

Launching a Shopping campaign allows you to:

Attract more qualified prospects
Generate more conversions (purchases)
Showcase your competitiveness if your pricing is lower than that of your competitors
Make internet users even more eager to buy (through photos, information, etc.)
Be transparent about your products, including price — which is essential for the customer

Video

If you have the resources (human and financial) to create an advertising spot in video format, it is well worth putting it to use. Video is one of the most engaging content formats overall.

To do so, if you select the "video" type on Google Ads, you will be able to have your ad broadcast on YouTube — notably before videos available on the platform.

Why choose this method:

Billing is based on views, which allows you to more concretely monitor expenditure
It allows for greater creativity
Videos can also be used with the display network
Precise targeting (demographics, interests, device, keywords, etc.)
Better engagement

App

This type of campaign is only useful if you have an application and wish to promote it. It can be broadcast both via the search network and via the display network, allowing for targeting just as precise as what you can achieve with those two campaign types.

Your ad can therefore gain visibility on search engines, on YouTube, on thematically related sites, and so on.

Smart

This is the quickest and simplest way to get started with advertising via Google Ads. In short, Google does a large part of the work for you. All you have to do is write a description of your business/activity and create a few ads. Everything related to targeting, bidding, or budget will be determined directly by Google.

Why bet on smart campaigns?

Accessible to everyone to launch
Optimisations handled directly by Google
Results (sales, visits, etc.) without too much effort

Local

You can use local ads if you want to develop the activity and/or awareness of your physical point of sale. This type of campaign is therefore particularly interesting if you have a location the public can visit — a shop, for instance.

Running this type of campaign allows you to better master and influence new consumer trends such as drive-to-store or web-to-store. These involve researching online before visiting a shop to make a purchase or collect an order — as exemplified by click-and-collect, which has now become part of our new buying habits, accelerated by the health crisis.

By investing in local campaigns, you can expect:

More in-store visits
A higher turnover
A return on investment that is easy to measure
Better local awareness
The ability to promote your in-store offers
More information about your establishment for visitors