Do you remember those days when Snapchat was the only social media platform that even had stories? Well, they are definitely over. First, Facebook and Instagram decided that they should have them too. Later, Twitter figured they also should take advantage of them. And just when everyone thought this was as far as it could go (except for, you know, calculators having their own stories too), Google came in and said “count us in.”
Actually, Google started developing their stories project back in 2018 and called it “AMP Stories”, because they were for Google Accelerated Mobile Pages project technology. Google Web Stories can appear on your own website, in Google Search, in Google Images, and also in the Google Discover App.
Basically, Google Web Stories, work just like any other social media story. You can upload images, text, CTAs, and even links to your content. It’s a very cool and quick way to help your SEO (by creating content and linking to your page, among other features) and it’s a very fun browsing method for your users. Google Web Stories are a great way to engage your audience and to tell different stories about your brand. You could, for example, tell stories about your users, employees, product and even show the everyday lifestyle in your company.
Recently, according to this article that I bumped into while doing my research, Google has also added a feature to actually sell Story Ads in open beta, while before you only could do so from Google Ad Manager. As said by Google, Story Ads will be handled in order to optimize both user experience and monetization potential. This new alternative sounds like a great opportunity to target new audiences and try out how effective this can actually be, right? However, no one is actually using them.
So Google came up with a new idea: Making them really cheap so they became a deal that’d be just impossible to ignore. But hold on for one second. If Google Web Stories are only featuring in Google sites, then they aren’t really paying anyone to have Ads run there, right? So how much of a deal is it if they actually have nothing at all to lose and it’s just publishers that pay for something that may not even work? Controversial, huh?
My thought about this is pretty simple: Google Stories aren’t really very popular right now, so putting Ads on them probably won’t get such a profit for your campaign. If Google Ads isn’t spending any money on having your Ads featured there, then wouldn’t it be much smarter to create some sort of “free trial” for these Story Ads? At least I know it’d be fairer.
So basically, to conclude, I think Story Ads are too much of a new-still-not-too-popular thing to spend money on. If you have a huge budget and you want to be a pioneer in the field, then for sure you should go ahead and try them. However, if you don’t, then my recommendation would be to go for something a little safer.