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.

Question 2

How Do My Google Ads Affect My Other Channels?

Accepted Answer

Other marketing channels will likely experience increased conv. rate & other positive indicators when you run & grow a Google Ad account.

This happens because of several reasons... As the Google Ads account grows:

It's able to increase conversion rate in other PPC channels as well as direct traffic because of the awareness-building that occurs from remarketing campaigns, outbound campaigns, brand campaigns, and just being present in search & shopping. (Remarketing especially is a seriously underrated ninja campaign because it follows people around the internet & reminds them to come back & buy, but there's no way to track it's impact. To know that it's working the only thing we can see is performance boosted on other channels. Try turning it off for a month or two and you will see it's impact.)
It's able to increase conversion rate of direct traffic because much of that traffic interacted with an ad at some point (after all, that's how they found the website). So the website's "direct" traffic has been warmed up by ad interactions & then the tracking was dropped (for a myriad of reasons) which causes them to be labeled as "direct."
It's able to find cold, brand new leads by competing for the competitive, expensive placements & clicks with standard shopping (a powerful workhorse to win bids & gain clicks from users who know nothing about you but who happen to be shopping at the time) and also outbound display/video (brand-building to cold, unknown users who have relevant interests). These cold users have a super low conversion rate because they often don't buy on that first click. And then tracking often gets dropped later when they finally do buy.
When those cold users do finally buy, FB will try to say it was their ads who got the sale, because FB includes "1-day view-throughs" in their conversions in order to pump their numbers. So FB will just remarket the crap out of all the cold leads Google found and then claim the sale even if there was never a click on a FB ad. It's insane.
And it's also likely that Analytics & Shopify will say those folks were "direct" because those platforms are not focused on using deep tracking that can trace back to the first ad click (since they are just website tracker tools that rely mostly on UTM parameters only). And the first click could have happened days or weeks before, often on a different device, different browser profile, etc.
Those first time cold leads that were finally converted turn into returning customers, boosting email performance, direct traffic numbers, and conv. rates even higher.

The channels work together holistically.

Onboarding: Lead Generation

Can you provide some guidance on image ads?

How Do My Google Ads Affect My Other Channels?