8 Exciting Advertisement Ideas You Can’t Live Without

In need of a few new advertisement ideas?

You’ve come to the right place. Below, I’ll go over some of the most exciting new advertisement features and options available today.

What We’ll Cover:

• Life Events in Google Ads
• In-Market Audiences
• Google Ad extensions
• Location Extensions and Store Visits for YouTube Ads
• Google Optimize
• Google Surveys 360
• Google Attribution
• AMP Landing Pages for Search and AMP Display Ads
• FAQ

1. Life Events in Google Ads

The first new advertising idea for 2019 is Life Events. 

Google Ads has always featured a healthy mix of targeting options.

Now, it’s adding another one to the list with Life Events, available for YouTube and Gmail ads.

First introduced by Facebook, Google has now joined the game and is now offering this nifty advertising feature.

Life Events targeting allows advertisers to target their ads based on important life milestones, so they can better reach their audience at the most crucial times.

Because purchase behavior shifts and brand preferences change during major life events, you can now use the following targeting methods to help you identify and target potential customers who are:

• About to graduate college
• Recently graduated college
• About to move
• Recently moved
• About to get married
• Recently got married

The life events are triggered by users’ search history, which Google uses to determine which major milestone they may be entering or leaving.

So, what does all this mean for brands?

It’s one of the advertisement ideas with a lot of opportunities, that’s what.

According to research by Network Insights, life event targeting is more effective than demographic targeting, noting that “Consumers going through life events are much more likely to have similar purchase needs than consumers that are merely in the same age, gender or income demographic.”

It’s able to produce big returns because life event marketing taps into major, emotional events. And when it comes to major purchases, emotions play a major role. So, for one of the best advertisement ideas, Life Events is a big one.

The success stories are already streaming in from brands like Sonos, who reported a 50% increase in ad recall, a 35% increase in purchase intent, and a 5x lift in Search after using life event targeting.

Google does note that because major life events are infrequent, brands will likely be  targeting a much smaller audience. However, this can pay off in the long run. Niches are a great place to exercise new  ideas.

For more on Google Life Events and how to use them in your marketing strategy, take a look at my complete guide.

2. In-Market Audiences

Let’s take a look at another one of those great ideas. 

In-market audiences aren’t exactly new to Google.

For those unfamiliar, using in-market audiences is a way for advertisers to connect with consumers who are actively researching and comparing products

Google explains:

“Reach potential customers while they’re actively browsing, researching or comparing the types of products you sell. Connect with those most interested in what you have to offer, using precise segments that classify users based on their demonstrated in-market behavior and purchase intent.”

Previously, this feature was previously only available for Display Network and YouTube campaigns, but Google recently extended in-market audiences to Search ads as well. Thus opening up ideas for marketers.

These also take advantage of users’ search histories to look for “behavioral signals” and determine when they may be nearing the end of the buying cycle and ready to make a purchase. In a sense, you can think of this method as sort of a live advertisement strategy.

Based on those signals, Google can then place users into categories based on buying intent, which advertisers choose from when they set up their ads.

The move to Search signals a big opportunity for advertisers to generate ideas, as Search is generally considered a better way to target real buyers.

As opposed to the Display Network where someone often stumbles across an ad while browsing, Search targets buyers during the search process.

Google currently offers in-market audiences in the following categories (along with subcategories in each):

• Apparel and Accessories
• Autos & Vehicles
• Baby & Children’s Products
• Beauty Products & Services
• Business Services
• Computers & Peripherals
• Consumer Electronics
• Consumer Software
• Dating Services
• Education
• Employment
• Financial Services
• Gifts & Occasions
• Home & Garden
• Real Estate
• Sports & Fitness
• Telecom
• Travel

Like other methods, ideas for in-market audiences can be used in tandem with other targeting options to improve an ad’s overall performance.

Specifically, Google recommends using them with remarketing ads for optimal results.

3. Use the New Google Ads Extensions

Google Ads users are no strangers to extensions. So, of course, they should be familiar with using specific extension for ideas.

Google Ads extensions allow marketers to include additional snippets of information with their ads.

Rather than the usual headline, URL, and a short description, an ad with an extension will include a little extra pizzaz. This can be in the form of a star rating to indicate customer reviews, a phone number for a simpler way to contact the business, additional links to the advertiser’s website, a product price, and more.

Using extensions for advertisement ideas is well worth it – Google reports that adding an extension can improve your click-through rate (CTR) by 10-15%.

And now, there are more options than ever. Recently, Google unveiled the following:

• Promotion Extensions
  • What they are: Promotion extensions are used to highlight any upcoming sales or promotions your business is offering to better target those looking for the best deals in your target niche.
  • How they appear: They appear below the body copy of your ad, with a bold label and up to two lines of additional text. This can include price discounts, coupon codes, etc.
  • Who should use them: Businesses promoting upcoming store or holiday sales should utilize these. They are also useful to generate new product ideas.
• Message Extensions
  • What they are: Message extensions allow customers to text your business directly from an ad. As Google explains, “People can contact you to book an appointment, get a quote, ask for information, or request a service.”
  • How they appear: These extensions appear as a message icon in your ad, and only appear to those with a phone that is capable of sending and receiving text messages. When a user clicks the icon, their messaging app will open with a pre-populated message the advertiser has created.
  • Who should use them: Those with the capability to receive and answer the queries. Make sure you have a strategy set up to deal with any incoming questions, and have populated the text with the appropriate information.
• Price Extension
  • What they are: Price extensions let you prequalify with price by adding in a list of services and their prices, which enables customers to browse your services without having to look for them on your site. This is one of the ideas that makes the user experience an easier, more pleasant one. 
  • How they appear: These appear as a set of up to 8 clickable cards below the text of your ad. When clicked on, they take prospects directly to the corresponding product or service page.
  • Who should use them: Any e-commerce business looking for an effective way to better qualify potential customers.
• App Extension
  • What they are: App extensions encourage people to download a brand’s app through a link in your ad.
  • How they appear: These appear below the text of the ad and direct users directly to your app download
  • Who should use them: Businesses with an app to offer users can benefit from app extensions.

4. Location Extensions and Store Visits for YouTube Ads

Now, let’s take a look at a few other ideas that can be useful. 

Speaking of ad extensions, Google just announced YouTube ads would be getting a location extension of its own.

This is the first extension to be added to YouTube, and will be available on TrueView in-stream ads and Bumper ads.

As viewers watch the ads, they will be able to see the address, directions, and opening hours of a business.

To go with the location extensions, Google also enabled store visit measurements for YouTube, which will track how many people actually went to a store after viewing an ad.

This is a big deal for a few reasons: 1.) It brings one of Google Ads great features (extensions) to one of its most popular search engines – YouTube, and 2) it gives advertisers more ways to measure the impact their ads have on offline activities.

Combined with the targeting abilities of YouTube ads, location extensions will help advertisers target real prospects and give them the information needed to visit their store – all in one ad. As far as ideas go, this one is a potential gold mine. 

Then, advertisers can track the effectiveness with the store visits measurement to see the actual impact their ad has on buyer traffic and behavior.

For any brands with a local business, this signals a major step forward in online advertising and should be considered one of the best advertising ideas for 2019.

5. Google Optimize

Google Optimize rolled out with a slew of new programs in Google Analytics 360.

A few of those programs also came with Google Ads integration – one of them being Google Optimize.

Optimize allows marketers to create and test variations of landing pages tied to their specific advertisement campaigns. It’s fully integrated with Google Analytics, which will allow advertisers to gain insight into conversion rates, bounce rates, mobile friendliness, etc.

The use of Optimize will make it easier for advertisers to A/B different elements of their campaign landing page, at either the campaign, ad groups, or keyword level. As an advertisement idea, it’s invaluable. 

Google gives a good example of targeting high-end customers using Optimize.

“An antiques dealer with AdWords campaigns targeting high-end customers can leverage those signals and run experiments on their premium landing page. For example, based on a hypothesis that high-end customers are more focused on authenticity and historical value than price, an antiques dealer could create an experiment on the landing page that prominently displays proof of authenticity and excludes prices.”

Currently, the Optimize integration supports search and shopping campaigns as well as Search Network with Display select, but only search traffic.

6. Google Surveys 360

Google Surveys 360 is another Google Ads-integrated Google Analytics 360, and ties in well with Optimize.

The Surveys allow advertisers and marketers to create and target surveys to remarketing lists to gather key information as to what is and isn’t working. This live advertisement strategy is crucial to developing better marketing techniques down the road.

The use of these surveys will allow much easier A/B testing, as it provides advertisers a way to directly ask their audience why an ad was or wasn’t clicked.

Though similar to the previous Google Surveys, Google Surveys 360 adds much more functionality by allowing brands to target users by zip code or remarketing list.

The surveys are a three-step process:

1. Create the survey
2. Find a specific audience to sample
3. Generate statistically relevant results

The speed of the surveys is one of the big selling-points for Google; typically, results can be returned in as little as a few days.

7. Google Attribution

Google Attribution and Google Attribution 360 were also recently released for advertisement ideas.

Google Attribution is a tool that helps marketers identify each channel that played a part in a sale and how much those channels contribute to overall return-on-investment (ROI).

It uses machine-learning to measure the impact of each customer touch-point by collecting and analyzing data from Google Analytics, AdWords, and DoubleClick search. It can be a big help in generating new product advertisement ideas. 

Too often, marketers look only at the last click a customer makes on their journey to a sale (called last-click attribution), but Google Attribution will help them understand the impact of each channel that customers have interacted with, whether it’s email, social media, PPC, etc.

Using Google Attribution has the potential to:

• Help advertisers better understand lower and mid-funnel interactions; it will reveal which channels a specific customer interacted with, and how a big of an impact that channel had in their conversion process
• Help advertisers decide where they should be spending the bulk of their budget

Initial beta tests of Google Attribution have seen success, with companies like HelloFresh reporting a 10% increase in conversions since using Attribution. For advertisement ideas, it’s a fantastic tool.

Note that the paid version, Google Attribution 360, comes as part of the Google Analytics 360 suite, while the free version was rolled out initially to select advertisers.

8. AMP Landing Pages for Search and AMP Display Ads

We all know it by now: page load speed is crucial to success, especially when it comes to mobile.

In fact, every one-second delay on a website causes a 20% decrease in conversion rate, according to Google.

This is where Google’s accelerated mobile pages (AMP) comes into play. Designed to make pages load in less than one second, this application is ideal for keeping visitors on your site.

So, how is this beneficial to the generation of advertisement ideas?

Now, advertisers can take advantage of AMP’s accelerated speed by applying it on their landing pages. Advertisers are now able to drive traffic from search and display ads to AMP landing pages.

Google previously released testing results from a few of the first to try AMP landing pages. These were the results:

• Wego.com reported a 95 percent jump in partner conversion rates and a 31 percent drop in bounce rates from AMP landing pages
• Greenweez reported an 80 percent increase in mobile conversion rate and 66 percent lower CPA on mobile from AMP traffic between January and March 2017.

AMP now supports dynamic content, checkout and payments, and A/B testing (note that it does not support third-party testing). These new features should help you come up with effective ideas for your business.

Also, keep in mind that Google suggests you not use AMP if your site has complex checkout flows.

In addition to the search landing pages, Google is also speeding up ads on the Google Display Network using AMP technology.

Google has automatically converted a number of ads across the network, and found that they typically load up to five seconds faster than regular ads, with no changes to the ad’s design or creative elements.

Advertisement Ideas FAQ:

1. What Are Some Offline Advertisement Ideas?

While digital marketing is a relatively new game, traditional advertising has been around forever. There are many different ways to go about generating offline advertisement ideas. 

Here are a few options:

• Printed coupons – Add your coupon in a coupon book that a local company distributes free of charge to nearby residents.
• Run a contest – Who says that a contest has to be online? Hold a raffle or local sweepstakes in your local area.
• Distribute branded freebies – Give away branded calendars, pens, coffee mugs, and anything else that you think will appeal to people in your market.
• Cold calls – Yes, it’s the 21st century. Yes, cold calls still work. Set aside some time to make a few every day.
• Sponsor City Maps – Tourists are mostly to stop by the business that is listed on the maps they carry around. 
• Invest in creative business cars – There are endless design options for business cards these days. Yours doesn’t have to be a boring piece of white card stock. 

2. What Advertisement Ideas From Decades Ago Still Work Today?

Businesses have been coming up with advertisement ideas for decades. They’ve gotten pretty good at it too.

Advertisers have always used catchy headlines to attract attention. There’s no reason to believe they’ll stop working now.

In fact, there are plenty of modern ads that demonstrate how attention-grabbing headlines still work.

You don’t have to just look at recent ads, though. Check out the classics for some great examples of copywriting as well.

Also, feel free to use headline templates to attract an audience.

3. Which Advertisement Ideas Make My Life As a Marketer Easier?

One way to promote your brand is to encourage other people to promote it for you.

How can you do that? There are several ways, but one of the best (and easiest) is to run a contest that involves people photographing themselves with your logo and posting it on social media. Then, give a prize to the person with the best photo.

It’s best to crowdsource the judgment as well. Ask people who follow you on social media to vote for the photo that they think is the best.

This is one of the many ideas that will give you more engagement and even further boost your brand.

You could also go live on Facebook or Instagram. This type of live advertisement will grab people’s attention and may generate new sales.

4. Is There a Fun, Unexpected Way to Use Advertisement Ideas to Boost Engagement?

Yes! The sky is the limit. 

One of the really cool ideas to utilize is to sponsor an online quiz. 

People love to talk about themselves and are very likely to engage in an online quiz that will enable them to show off their knowledge.

5. What Are Some Key Advertisement Ideas That Never Go Wrong?

Well, that’s a tricky question. We can’t make everyone happy, but there are several ideas that have proven to hit-the-nail-on-the-head on many occasions.

• Adorable animals
• Clever puns
• Creative comedy
• Pop-culture references

These are some great elements to incorporate into your advertisement ideas that rarely backfire. 

Wrapping up Advertisement Ideas

There are plenty of new ways to get your ad out there.

By taking advantage of the new ideas, features, and targeting options, you can better ensure that your ad is delivered to the right people at the right time.