A Guide to Google Ads Campaign Types: Reaching Your Audience at Every Stage of the Funnel

In today’s digital landscape, Google Ads is one of the most powerful tools for driving business growth. To get the best results, it’s important to understand how each campaign type works and how it fits into the marketing funnel—the journey from brand awareness to conversion. Let’s break down the different Google Ads campaign types and how they can be used to meet your business goals.

3 Stages Of The Marketing Funnel

• Awareness: Capturing the attention of new audiences
• Consideration: Engaging potential customers in researching options
• Conversion: Driving final actions like purchases, sign-ups, or inquiries

Understanding the journey your audience takes before they take that final step and convert will help you decide which types of campaigns will be the most impactful in reaching your business goals. Now, let’s discuss the different types of Google Ads campaigns and how they can be used to reach people at different stages in the funnel.

Breakdown of Google Ads Campaign Types

• Search: Google Search campaigns place ads in search results and allow advertisers to bid on keywords using a cost-per-click model. The goal is to have your ad show up at the top of the search results page to maximize clicks to your website and drive conversions. These ads appear when users are actively searching for your products or services, making them effective for capturing users with high intent to convert at the bottom of the funnel.
• Display: Display campaigns are image-based ads that show across Google’s Display network, including banners, in-feed ads, Gmail Ads, etc. Unlike Search campaigns, which target users actively searching for specific terms, Display campaigns focus on building brand awareness, retargeting past visitors, and creating interest through targeted placements and audience segments. This type of campaign is best for engaging your audience at the top and middle of the funnel.
• Performance Max: Performance Max campaigns are fully automated and use various signals to target and deliver ads to people across all of Google’s networks, including Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. These campaigns combine text, image, and video assets to create multi-format ads, helping businesses reach users throughout the funnel at every stage of the customer journey.
• Shopping: Designed for e-commerce businesses, Shopping ads show product images, descriptions, and prices directly in the search results. Because users have a more complete picture of the product before they click on the site, this results in higher-quality traffic that is more likely to result in a purchase. Like search campaigns, these ads operate on a cost-per-click model and reach people at the bottom of the funnel with a higher intent to convert.
• Video: Video campaigns run on YouTube and Google’s video partner sites and apps, and offer various formats, including skippable and non-skippable in-stream ads, bumper ads, in-feed video ads, etc. Video ads are a great way to tell your brand’s story in a way that’s visually appealing and engaging. These campaigns help businesses looking to increase brand awareness and grow their audience, making them most effective at the top of the funnel.

Choosing the Right Campaign Type for Your Business

Each campaign type serves different purposes, targets different audiences, and contributes to various stages of the marketing funnel—from generating brand awareness to driving conversions. It’s important to make sure that the type of campaign you are running directly aligns with your business goals. It’s also important to consider your budget so you can determine when to prioritize brand awareness versus lead generation. If maximizing return on ad spend is your top priority, not all campaign types will be equally effective.

The best option is to use a full-funnel approach, using multiple campaign types that help you generate awareness at a high level, retarget users in the consideration stage, and capture people at the bottom with the intent to convert.

Creating the right campaign strategy is not always easy and requires constant testing and optimization. At Lodestar Marketing Group, we have experts who can help. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help you grow your business.