Why you need creative for Google: a Google-specific creative strategy

Mobile app marketers need to build creative for Google specifically. 

Why?

Because YouTube.

There’s probably more to it than just YouTube — Google has other ad placements on other properties with their own qualities — but it’s especially about YouTube, which is a unique combination of legitimately immense global reach with some very platform-specific ad slots.

I recently spent 30 minutes with mobile growth consultant Ashley Black. 

She’s an ex-Googler who spent most of her decade with the tech giant in the mobile user acquisition space. She’s now running her own company, Candid Consulting, and sharing the results of her insider insights into what works on Google and other platforms. 

(And yes, what still kinda sucks at Google Ads.)

Hit play, keep scrolling:

Black box blender?

Many major platforms these days feel like black boxes for advertisers. They have proprietary algorithms for how they’ll deal with your ads, find an audience, engage with them, and report the results. 

Google can feel like one of the blackest of the black boxes and pioneered what I call the “rip, mix, burn” of adtech. That’s simply making up ads on the fly from your components to test hundreds or thousands of iterations and find what performs best.

It’s essentially the adtech blender: give us your text, your images, your videos, your desired conversions, and we’ll slice and dice and saute to create the perfect adtech meal … AKA achieving your ROAS goals. 

(Of course, soon that might not even be necessary. All of the big platforms are playing with generative AI for ads: maybe you won’t have to give the platform anything but your website URL and app listing, and it’ll invent everything needed for high performance ads out of thin air.)

But the rip, mix, burn blender is not entirely the way it works. 

Especially with regard to YouTube.

And that’s a key reason you need to build creative for Google: specifically designed and engineered just for Google App Campaigns. And for YouTube’s very specific ad opportunities.

YouTube: a key reason you need creative for Google

It’s easy to forget, but YouTube has grown into a truly massive platform.

Google has about 2.5 billion monthly active users: billion with a B. Half of the people on the internet visit YouTube at least once a month. All told, we watch a billion hours of video a day on YouTube, and to feed that insatiable thirst for new content, YouTubers, media companies, and brands upload almost a million hours of new videos every single day.

(Some of that is Growth Masterminds. Subscribe here.)

Most importantly in adtech terms, YouTube made $22.31 billion in ad sales last year. That’s almost $25 billion in spend that advertisers have given to Google, and Google has chosen to deploy on YouTube.

“I think one of the big things that people don’t realize is that YouTube, especially on iOS, is a massive portion of inventory for Google,” says Black. “And you have such different types of video content on YouTube.”

A brief overview of what YouTube offers for advertisers and brands:

• Shorts
• Long-form videos (of course)
• Bumper ads (6 second pre-rolls)
• Longer pre-roll and mid-roll ads
  • Partially-skippable 
  • Non-skippable 
• Sponsored cards (in-stream discovery)
• And, of course, non-video ads (banners, text, overlays)

Most of the video ad formats are available for landscape and portrait depending on whether you’re targeting mobile users or desktop. Some of them are unique or unusual in other ad networks or platforms, and that’s a key reason why you need to build creative for Google specifically.

“There’s just so many differences and you do have to test them all, but you can’t just try and replicate what worked well on one network without paying attention to how users are actually using the different inventory types on Google’s network,” says Black.

In other words, using creative you designed for a social network on YouTube can be as silly as using TikTok ads on Reddit. There’s no ironclad guarantee that they won’t work, but you have a much higher likelihood of success building custom creative for Google.

Google could help change the black box perception …

Part of the problem is that this misperception is at least partially Google’s own fault. Google’s ad tools aren’t quite as advertiser-friendly as its big blue social network competition, says Black.

“Google’s not doing itself any favors by not showcasing where the ads show,” she adds. 

“I’ve been working a lot more on Meta’s platform and they do a great job at visualizing for people: ‘Hey, this is what your ad’s gonna look like here, and this is what it looks like here’ … and Google just doesn’t do that. And so I think a lot of times people assume it’s just this black box. Like, just throw it in and see what happens without really any real strategy or intention.”

Building specific creative for Google, however, can unlock big rewards.

A client who used a lot of user-generated content on Meta decided to bring that over to Google. 

But the UGC didn’t perform well and — thanks to size and format — only ran on a fraction of the available inventory. Black tested some new ads designed specifically for Google’s inventory on YouTube and found that not only did they perform better, they also got picked up by Google’s algorithm for brand-new inventory that the client had never tested before.

The results were eye-opening.

“It was just really interesting to see that … a lot of their UGC style was serving on YouTube and on shorts because that’s where the system knew it would do well, but it had never had an opportunity to go out and test these other pockets of inventory,” Black says. 

“You gotta test more stuff.”

Your creative for Google strategy sometimes needs a friendly Google Ads rep

It’s always good to have a friend on the inside. And while insights about ads can be limited on Google Ads, your rep can actually get a bit more data for you than is visible in the dashboard.

(Singular can also help: proper data governance reveals where ad fragments and creative components were used. Also, see Multiple breakdowns: how to get more data from your ad networks than they offer.)

Which means, if you have a conversation with your rep, you can get an inside edge — sometimes — on how you can tailor your creative for Google to be more effective. More performant.

Much more in the full Growth Masterminds chat

There’s much more in our full Growth Masterminds chat. 

Subscribe to Growth Masterminds on your favorite audio or video channel to get all of that insight, including the level of spending you have to commit to on YouTube to really get good results. Spoiler alert: it’s higher on iOS than it is on Android.

Find all the links to subscribe right here …