The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

In the past few weeks, we’ve introduced support for Image Ads (and other emerging ad formats) into Clickable Pro, and provided a few tips on this blog for creating and bidding on them. However, we haven’t addressed the major issue that prevents users from trying Image Ads: actually building graphical banners. There is, however, one image that you already have immediate access to, and it wouldn’t hurt to try an inexpensive branding campaign using it: your logo. If you limit your campaign to branded terms, your logo will only appear on sites with extremely high relevance in the Content network (such as blogs with posts about your company). Your quality score will also be very high on those keywords, so you can limit your daily budget to something like $5 a day without losing out on lots of free impressions.

To try this kind of campaign, you need an ad group dedicated to your brand name. (For tips about bidding on your brand name, check out this earlier guru post.) Even if you already have a brand name ad group, you should create a separate one for image ads so you can manage their budgets separately.  Once your ad group is in place, you need to build your ad. The first thing you need to do is format your logo. AdWords accepts images in four different sizes (described in detail on our Product Guide). Choose the one that’s closest to your logo in size, but slightly larger. Then, create a simple image file that’s the correct size and set the background color to match that of your logo (white in most cases). Then, center your logo in that image. Save the file in an acceptable format (PNG will help keep the file size down) and you’ve got your image ad!

Creating the ad in Clickable is easy. Just go to the Manage section for the ad group you’ll be using, and click on the “Other Ad Types (Beta)” link. You’ll have three options: Image Ads, Mobile Ads and Local Business Ads. Click the “Create This Ad Type” button beside Image Ad.

The only thing left to do is fill out a few simple fields. First, click on the “Browse” button and navigate to your image. Next, choose a name for your image (up to 50 characters), and a display and destination URL. Click “SAVE!” at the bottom-right, and your ad will be live in no time.