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Get the most out of your campaign by building compelling creative.

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1. Know the basics

You should familiarize yourself with these common terms.

Creative assets

Great campaigns rely on impactful creative assets, encompassing text, images, video, or HTML5. You can supply your own assets or automatically generate them through the App or Play Store.

Ad formats

These campaign outputs result from rendering your original creative assets into diverse ad formats, representing what your target audience sees. App campaigns are automatically generated and displayed across the Google Ads network.

Ad groups

You can create a new ad group for each campaign. These content themes or buckets help you target audience segments with more relevant creative assets. When you build different ad groups, consider what will most likely influence specific audiences.

Illustration depicting a smartphone and various app icons, including text messaging, email, search, video, games, and social media

2. Get inspired

Watch this journey through some creative learnings to consider when building your next campaign.

Watch the video
Illustration depicting a smartphone and various app icons, including text messaging, email, search, video, games, and social media

3. Prepare your creative assets

An icon depicting a “bright idea” light bulb

Top tip

While preparing multiple assets at the beginning of your campaign is important, you should tailor the strategy and focus on the right assets, orientation, and sizes as you learn which orientation works best.

4. Assess your campaign

Vary your creative assets to optimize performance

The ad strength indicator helps you evaluate your App campaign assets to ensure they’re sufficiently diverse for achieving optimal performance. If your rating needs improvement, try crafting more creative assets like text, images, and video.

You need to monitor your campaign performance post-launch, too. The asset performance report can help you understand which creative elements resonate with customers when building new creative assets.

More information about the Ad Strength indicator.

More information about the asset report.

5. Best practices

Include clear calls-to-action in your text assets

A strong call-to-action (CTA) helps ensure your audience understands what you have to offer and how to take action. Adjust your CTAs according to your campaign goals and clearly highlight your brand and offerings in your headlines and descriptions.

Use a wide variety of assets

To increase the chance your ads will be displayed across all ad channels, provide the maximum number of text, image, video, and where relevant, HTML5 assets. You should include visuals of people interacting with your products or services to create real-life context for potential customers.

Build for smaller screens

Provide visual assets that clearly and immediately communicate your CTA. Use overlays sparingly and showcase your products and services with tight framing and bright, natural lighting.

Give your creatives time to test

Once you upload a new asset, you should wait 2-3 weeks to give the Google Ads system time to learn and optimize its strategies. You can review Ad Strength and asset reporting to better understand which assets perform best.

6. Useful resources

Use these additional resources to start creating successful campaigns.

Find a partner to help with creative assets

Our mobile-first agency partners can help maximize your ad’s impact.

Explore our creative partners directory.

Make better creative assets for App campaigns

This article provides best practices for developing creative assets that can improve your App campaign performance and reach, including text, image, video, and HTML5.

Learn about creative asset best practices.

App creative policy

Read our app creative policy to help you build App campaigns that align with Google’s advertising policies.

View our creative policies.

Well done! You’re now ready to take action.

Download our creative best practices checklist to help create campaigns with real impact.