Create the best creative assets for app campaigns

Creative assets are the elements used by app campaigns to create ads. This article discusses best practices for developing creative assets, including text, image, video, and HTML5 assets that can improve the performance and reach of your app campaign. For more technical instructions, such as the asset specifications accepted by app campaigns, see the section on how to create an app campaign.

The advice contained in this document is for the sole purpose of providing guidelines. Because every campaign is different, performance cannot be guaranteed, even if all guidelines are followed. We recommend that you check the Asset Report and update it regularly.

All ad content must adhere to the policy guidelines and personalized advertising guidelines.

General guidelines on assets

Align with the brand’s goals, tone and style
While these guidelines relate to advertisers’ results, each business is unique. You need to evaluate each best practice against your business needs and make sure they align with your campaign goals.

Align with campaign goals

Creative assets must reflect the specific goals of your app campaigns. For example:

To incentivize installs, assets need to trick users into installing, for example with a “Download Now” or “Play Now” text creative.
To incentivize purchases, assets must show balances, discounts, or items available for purchase, for example with a message such as “Get € 5 off your first order” or an image depicting a promotion.
To increase loyalty or incentivize re-engagement, assets must highlight the features of the final funnel or those recently made available, in order to induce users to interact, for example with a text of the type “More than 100 articles coming” or a video illustrating the updated gameplay.
Align with the theme of the relevant ad group, if applicable
Ad groups in app campaigns allow you to “group” creative assets based on specific features or messages of the apps you want to highlight or the demographics of the users you want to engage. The assets must therefore represent these different functionalities, messages and user needs; For example, you can upload sushi-themed creatives to one ad group to attract sushi-themed food lovers and pizza-themed creatives to another ad group for takeaway food enthusiasts.

Diversify creative assets

The variety of assets allows app campaigns to create multiple ads that appeal to different users. It can also allow ads to be eligible for serving on multiple advertising channels. To maximize ad placements and ad combinations, please upload the maximum number of assets allowed for each type, i.e. 4 for text and 20 for each image, video and, where applicable, HTML5 asset. This can come with an added benefit, which is minimizing performance fluctuations when updating creative assets.

Google Ads won’t translate ads, so it’s important to choose the correct languages ​​when setting up your campaign. Then select all the countries where there are people who speak these languages. Broad targeting allows you to reach more users who meet your goals and gives our machine learning models more data with which to refine campaigns.

Engage the public

Assets must use conversational text in titles and descriptions, recognizable images, and effective audio to grab and hold the user’s attention.