Waiting too long for Image Ad Approval on AdWords?
I often find that my image ads (for accounts without reps) get approved within 1 hour, 3 days, or they stay in the ‘review status’ forever.
The Google AdWords queue seems to break quite often as I’ve seen this trend for more than a year where most images are not either approved or disapproved – they just sit in the review status. This leaves marketers in a state of perpetual waiting.
There seems to be two quick ways to get images approved:
Use the Display Ad Builder
Google’s display ad builder makes it easy to build image or video ads within their system.
When you select the display ad builder option, you can choose a template to customize and quickly build out rich media ads.
These ads are good, not great, as they are being built from templates. I do like the system for quickly creating and testing image ad messages.
There are two major advantages to using the Display Ad Builder:
- It’s easy to create image ads
- The ads seem to be approved very quickly
I can only count a handful of times when I had to ask Google to approve my display ad builder ads.
Contact AdWords Support
Contacting Google for ad approval purposes seems a bit convoluted as Google has some pretty bad forms and explanations of what a form does. I do find if you contact them about approvals, the ads are almost always reviewed within 1-3 days. To contact Google to have your images (or any ads) approved, follow these steps:
- Click on the help link (make sure you’re not blocking popups as a popup window will appear)
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click ‘contacting us’
- Navigate to Ad visibility, approvals and performance > ad approval and policies > how long does it take my ad to be approved
- On the side of the page, click email
- Fill out the very short form (contact info, ad group, campaign)
- Submit data
The form doesn’t really say what’s going to happen, but if you fill it out – then your ads will re-enter the AdWords approval queue.
Of course, if you have a rep – feel free to contact your rep as they can help put the ads back into the review process, and some can expedite the process.
Using Google’s Image Ads
Today I’m going to give you a secret to getting an avalanche of traffic on the Content Network, using Google’s Image Ads. I’ll begin 
by explaining something that’s totally core, thoroughly fundamental to hyper-effective, profitable advertising.
Every form of media and every way of selling any kind of space has its own fundamental financial metric.
Commercial real estate is leased according to dollars per square foot per year. Therefore the core metric of a retail store is sales per square foot.
The core metric of the Internet is dollars per thousand impressions.
Every Google search is an impression and that impression is what Google has to sell, period.
So even though AdWords charges you per click, it rewards you for Click Thru Rate. So if you do the math, at the end of the day you’re paying for impressions. The #1 bidder is the guy who gives Google the most $ per 1000 impressions. The #2 bidder is the second most profitable advertiser per thousand impressions.
The same is true on the Content Network. The ads that get the best coverage are the ones that get the most clicks and generate the most money per thousand impressions.
Well if you break it down one step further, each ad or ad block takes up a certain amount of space so it really comes down to:
PENNIES PER PIXEL.
Many AdSense syndicators allow Google to serve both text ads and image ads on their sites. The way Google decides which to serve is: Which makes more money per pixel – 3 text ads or one image ad?
If your 250×300 banner ad can $out-perform three text ads, your banner gets shown instead of three other advertisers’ text ads.
OK, so here’s the punchline:
***PIXEL FOR PIXEL, AN IMAGE AD CAN ALWAYS OUTPERFORM A TEXT AD.***
Why?
Simply because you can test more things.
Text ads only have text and they’re black and white. Each pixel in an image ad has 65,536 possible colors. Banner ads have color, texture, faces, patterns, animation… flavor.
My friend, that’s the Pixel Power Principle.
This is why Image Ads can get MUCH higher CTR’s than text ads – 2 to 5 times better. Again, they must, to even get served. But there is literally an endless variety of things you can test. It’s a new frontier in Google AdWords. I’ve really been enjoying the art of playing with these image ads.
Listen up: You test 30-50 banner ads with a Content-Friendly topic, and you are going to come up with one or two ads that SLAY DRAGONS and enter the fabled “Jet Stream.”
Oh, and by the way I discovered a really talented graphic designer who makes beautiful image ads for me. Her name is Laura Husmann, “The Banner Ad Queen.” Her website is www.BannerAdQueen.com.
Enjoy the science and the ART of testing cool banner ads on the Content Network.
Banner ads are soooo 2010!
Perry Marshall
