General FAQ Getting Started & Onboarding Performance Max Strategy Tutorials

Can you provide some guidance on image ads?

There are two types of image ads: shopping ads & display ads.

Shopping Ads

Shopping ads are only relevant to you if you sell physical products online & are planning to run shopping campaigns. The images needed for these campaigns are imported into Google Ads directly from the product image on your eCommerce site.

This type of images are relatively straightforward:

  • Make sure the product is clearly displayed & takes up the majority of the image.
  • Ideally have a plain background. It can have a subtle pattern, a shadow, or a gradient, for example, but it shouldn't distract from the product itself. Light colored backgrounds tend to convert at a higher rate on Google Shopping. We recommend going to shopping.google.com (or you can use isearchfrom.com if you live in a country that doesn't have Google Shopping yet) and doing a few quick searches to find your competitor's shopping ads to get a sense of what will catch the user's attention & what won't.
  • Any text in the image must be text that's on the product itself or it's packaging. If you add a logo or a call-to-action to this image, Google's bots will crawl the ad eventually & disapprove it.

FYI if the first image (the primary image) on the product listing is less ideal than one of the other images, our team can override the product image directly in the product feed. This way we can use the best image for the shopping ad in Google Ads while keeping your favorite image as primary on the product landing page.

Display Ads

Display ads are typically used in remarketing campaigns (this means it only shows to website visitors & YouTube channel viewers) and also be in outbound campaigns (meaning it will show to cold leads).

Here's what you need to know:

  • These should be lifestyle images. If your business sells products, this ideally means images of a person (with their face showing) using the product in some way. If your business sells services, this ideally means images of an employee (with their face showing) either offering the service or a customer receiving the service or benefiting from it's results. Yes, you can absolutely use stock photos.
  • We can ideally use 7 square images and 7 horizontal images. Google Ads will help us crop them to the perfect aspect ratio, so don't worry too much about getting it perfect.
  • These images can have text on them if you would like, although they don’t need to have text on them because we use something called “responsive display” which basically uses ad copy & images to create an ad into the perfect aspect ratio needed for whatever placement Google is trying to fit it into. Here’s a video & article from Google that shows how these work. If you want to experiment with adding a short call-to-action as text on these lifestyle images, go for it! We believe that can be very effective if the there are only a few words in total (pick one short phrase). Just don’t make fake buttons on the image, because Google will disapprove those.