Google Ads Image Specification

Google Ads Image Specification

Looking for essential information about Google Ads image ads? In this post, you’ll find the most important info. We will discuss the basic technicalities, such as image sizes, content policy compliance and factors crucially impacting your campaign’s marketing efficiency.

Table of Contents:

Maybe you’ve read our post “What Are Google Ads” – today we will take an even closer look and present specifications for Google image ads. The article you are about to read is supposed to serve as a cheat sheet for google ad sizes, a point of future reference anytime you’ll be preparing an image-based AdWords campaign. So remember to bookmark it! You can also share the article with the person directly responsible for creating the Google AdWords image ads campaign.

What a Google image ad should include

  • Company logo. Each image ad should include a logotype. Instead of a standard logo copy-paste engineering or a simplified logo, it’s better to take time to come up with more inventive solutions. As an example of such innovation, imagine a banner showcasing a product with a logo on it, clearly exposed – e.g. in the case of a tech manufacturer, its mobile phone or laptop, a photo of a company’s office or trade fair stand, advertising tent or even a marketing gadget (t-shirt, business cards).
  • Call to Action (a.k.a. CTA) To get the audience to convert, include a Call to Action in your banner, such as: “Visit our website”, “Check out the offer”, “order NOW!”, “call us”, “sign up for a newsletter”, etc. The best way to expose CTA is in the form of a button. Good CTA is good visually – catches. While contrasting colors seem an obvious choice, it’s not necessary, but the CTA button should nevertheless somehow stand out in the whole composition.

    Google AdWords image ad
    Example of our ad for polish market – CTA: “Order free quote”

  • USP (Unique Selling Point) – a unique benefit that the customer acquires, buying the product. USP should pervade our image ads, by being highlighted in its headings or description. Preparing several mockups, considering various USPs, is definitely a good idea.
  • Product picture and price. Mandatory in any product advertising. If you’re running a Google AdWords Dynamic Remarketing campaign, these data will be extracted from Google Merchant Center. For a bargain, a dedicated banner showcasing the products on sale is a wonderful idea, too. A classic move here is showing the old price crossed out, or highlighting how much is the discount, or by what percentage the new price is lower than the old one.
  • Sale info. Required for a good sale image ad: the bargain title, its duration, and other news you want to break to the potential customer. The image can also communicate a promo code, provided that it’s easy to memorize and that the ad is displayed frequently; otherwise, the campaign may trigger unexpected frustrated customer backlash due to the inability to write down or remember the code. Promo code from the banner or other ad should therefore be easily found on the landing page.
  • Landing page referral. Ideally, the image ad and the landing page overview match. For the sake of this “dubbing” effect, the banner may copy the landing page layout, only with adjustments as to the size or text. Mind that any information included in the image ad needs to be easily found on the landing page.

google ad sizes images

We suggest preparing at least two different mockup image ad sets in order to run an A/B test. In the case of targeting a large group (over 10 000), the variations may differ in details only – e.g. color of the button. For smaller, albeit larger than 1 000 subjects, groups test only compositions significantly different from each other. In the case of targeting a group of fewer than 1 000 subjects, the sampling error is likely to render the findings statistically insignificant.

Optional compositional elements

  • Figurative headline dubbing. Depending on the industry and the marketing strategy itself, there are a handful of guidelines for creating persuasive headlines. One of them says that the visual composition should refer to the content, for example: for a headline advertising sales increasing service, the visual layer shows e.g. mountains, and together with a headline exclaiming “success”, an icon of sports champion goes.
  • The everlasting guidelines are also the following: golden ratio, tripartite composition division, laws – Hick’s and Fitt’s and Occam’s Razor. These are also some additional elements to learn about, which is strongly recommended if you want to keep improving your compositions.

Things to avoid while creating an image ad

  • Word count overkill or unreadable content. Mind the fonts – some of them are hard to read, is they’re too small or appear too fuzzy. On the other hand, if you include too much text content, your image ads may be disapproved by Google. Put a strong focus on the headlines and the Call to Action instead. Don’t let the total amount of space occupied by text exceed 20%-30% of the entire image area.
  • No landing page referral. Bounce rate spikes, whenever the landing page visually strongly differs from a layout they saw in a banner they decided to click on. As the bounce rate gets high, the marketing effectiveness of our landing page drops, along with the effectiveness of your image ad campaign.
  • Low-quality design. “Fine feathers make fine birds” – this proverb sums up the take-home-message behind numerous guidelines for image ad creation. Google image ad creation should stick to the most up-to-date internet visual trends. Therefore, if you cannot afford a visual artist, think about using responsive or text ads only, instead. Mind that the main goal of an image ad campaign is to build brand awareness.
  • Bad visual targeting. “Jack of all trades is a master of none” – another proverb in today’s guide, reminding that even for the most popular FMCG products, defining the target group for our communication is a must. Personalization significantly increases the effectiveness of our activities.

Image ad will be disapproved if:

  • The content is misleading.
  • The image quality is poor.
  • Its relevance is too low.
  • Promotes NSFW content.
  • Promotes harmful products.

Google Ad Sizes –  Image Specification

Supported ad specifications

File types

  • Formats: GIF, JPG, PNG, SWF, ZIP
  • Maximum size – 150 KB

An image should be a file of one of the formats above, with a maximum weight of 150KB (mind that it’s also a limit for html5 files).

FAQ

Google Ads is an advertising system from Google company. Launched in 2000, the system is constantly developing allowing more ways to promote your brand online. At this moment Google Ads offers ads in a form of links in a paid search result on Google search engine, text-based ads, image and video ads that appear on Gmail, YouTube, and other websites that cooperate with AdSense.

Google Ads are a great way to support natural website visibility online. It can be especially beneficial for:

  • online stores owners
  • service providers
  • content publishers
  • advertisement websites with certificates
  • manufacturers
  • everyone who wants to increase traffic with paid ads.
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Author
Senior SEM Specialist - Adrian

Senior SEM Specialist

SEM specialist since 2009 professionally connected with Internet marketing. He specializes in performance marketing, conversion optimization and data analysis. He gained experience working for both the agency and the client. He is passionate about road cycling and mountain cross-country running.
Comments (2)
  1. Nice article. I have a question – should I somehow work with images that I put into the content (such as landing pages, blog posts, etc.) so that they work for my website performance? Up until now I just added them, end of story but I heard that they can support SEO as well, so how to do it?

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