As a 21st century car dealer, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Google’s core advertising products and offerings. You pour thousands of dollars per month into SEM campaigns to capture audiences searching for your products and display banner ads to capture the in-market audience traffic after they’ve moved on to another web page. These tried and true mediums are part of the recipe for advertising success, but Google is cooking up something new that just might become a staple in your balanced advertising plan. They’re called Discovery Ads.  They’re a little different from your traditional Google Ads mediums, and they’re slated to play a bigger role in the future of Google Ads.

Discovery ads are built from the ground up with the mobile user in mind. They feature compelling images, informative headlines and mobile interactivity similar to Facebook’s carousel ads. With their emphasis on image quality and interactivity, Discovery Ads enable advertisers to tell a story with their advertisements and meaningfully reach higher funnel customers to kick start their purchase journey.

Mobile advertising’s rapid ascent over the last decade is no secret. It seems like every marketing seminar is full of mobile buzz words and advertisers are always looking to capture more of the mobile traffic boom.  Google Discovery Ads are geared specifically towards mobile with their placements and design.  They appear on three of the top mobile destinations in the world: Google Discover, YouTube and Gmail.

Google Discover is Google’s news feed app, and with 800 Million monthly users and growing, it is an extremely popular place to get news about all of your interests. In prior blog posts we’ve discussed the sheer scale of YouTube’s influence on the modern internet. It’s currently the second largest search engine behind Google itself, and every single day over 1 Billion hours of YouTube videos are consumed, and in the average month 80% of 18-49 year-olds watch a video on YouTube at least once. And finally, Gmail is by far the most popular browser email client and Google’s Gmail app is the second most popular email app with 38% of the market share, coming just behind Apple Mail’s 40%. With the immense size of their market share, you can see how gaining exclusive access to ad placements on these extremely popular mobile platforms is a huge advantage for any modern car dealership.

So, what is the focus and intent of Discovery Ads? Discovery ads are an excellent way to reach higher funnel customers and kick start their car buying journey.  While SEM ads and traditional display ads are a great way to get your best prices in front of lower funnel buyers, they’re a bit limited in their ability to convey information beyond that.  The synergy of multiple images and text snippets in Discovery Ads allows dealers to tell a visual story and generate interest in higher funnel customers, while the seamless integration of Discovery Ads into their favorite mobile sites and streams means more engagement.

For example, let’s say your OEM is launching a new model, which will be available in 6 months. Creating Discovery Ads for that model now and hi-lighting the features is a great way to build awareness and interest in the community while filling your upper funnel with demand for the release. If all goes well, when it comes time for those high funnel customers to transition to lower funnel customers, they’ll associate your dealership with the new model and seek to purchase from you.  A continuously re-filled upper funnel is the key to keeping your lower funnels full of potential customers, and the best way to do that is get in front of potential customers early and stay in front of them for the whole buying journey.

As an Automotive Digital Marketing company, this is something we’ve been watching closely, and with the introduction of Discovery Ads, Google has not only given advertisers medium to display their offerings, but a new dimension to their advertising strategies.  Discovery Ads allow advertisers to tell a visual story, unobtrusively tap into an enormous mobile market, and touch and guide higher funnel shoppers on the beginning stages of their purchase journey. The end result is a better ad experience for the customer and an extremely valuable high funnel touch point for the advertiser; both of which lead to a more painless buying journey and sales process. If you’d like to learn more about adding Discovery Ads to your advertising plan, reach out to our digital team today here or call 877-958-4524 and we’ll be happy to help you!