Sudheer Kiran

Sudheer Kiran

Marketer, Musician, and Philanthropist

AdWords Ad Customizers: Customize Ads with Real-Time Updates

What is Google AdWords Ad Customizers?

Ad customizers are new feature in Google Adwords to run your Ads dynamically without changing your Ad copy text. This will saves your time, and run dynamic ads from your uploaded spreadsheet based on your scripts.

AdWords Ad Customizers Example

Ad customizers are a set of parameters that allow ad copy to be updated dynamically in real-time.

Ad customizers adapt your ads to the real-time context of your potential customers—what they’re searching for, where they’re browsing, what device they’re using, and when they’re looking at your ad. To run these Daynamic ads using Ad customizers, you need a little JavaScript coding knowledge to set parameters and count down to your AdWords campaigns, Ad groups or your individual ads.

Who can use AdWords Ad Customizers?

Anyone can use these Ad customizers to save time and to run your Ads creatively. Especially, for advertisers who manages huge volume of ads, ad customizers can be helpful for managing product variations, pricing adjustments and promotions at scale..

Benefits of AdWords Ad Customizers

Ad customizers work for any text ad on the Search or Display Network, but cannot be used in the URL fields.

  1.  Tailored messaging: Ads are hyper-specialized to each search or webpage being viewed.
  2. Time-sensitive calls to action: TheCOUNTDOWN function can say that time’s running out to take advantage of a promotion.
  3. Scalability: Customizers let a single text ad have hundreds of variations, and show the most relevant variation to each potential customer.
  4. Reporting: The automatic updates that happen when an ad is triggered don’t reset the ad’s performance data.

How to use AdWords Ad Customizers?

  • Create ad customizer data Template:

Download the ad customizer data template (.csv). Once you downloaded the data template, You need to edit this data sheet with your elements and products details. The Data Sheet is made up of columns containing information like price, models or any other relevant data. This is for the purpose of telling Google how to format the data by listing one of four attributes in parentheses next to your column headers: text, number, price, or date.

  •  Define the custom attributes (details) that you want each customizer to show

Once you finalized your keywords and values of your columns, you need to define your attributes in template columns.

Please check below example:

ad-customizers-spreadsheet

  • Where you can upload the Ad Customizer Data Template?

Okay, now your data sheet is ready with all attributes. But, what to do with that data sheet to run your Google AdWords Ads dynamically?

You need to upload your ad customizer data template with targeting attributes and information on device preference, scheduling, product detail, price, event timing or any custom text that you define to pull into the ads.

Once your spreadsheet is fully populated, remembering to remove the sample rows 2 and 3, you need to upload it to Adwords.

Navigate to the Business Data section of your Shared Library:

add-ad-customizers-data

Once you’ve selected Data -> Ad customiser data, you can find your file and upload it.

upload-ad-customizer-spreadsheet

Create Your Ads

When creating ads, you need to include the ad customizer parameters you want to use for dynamic copy insertion. Now, you need to use this format when dropping in your parameters: {=DataSetName.AttributeName} – make sure you’ve matched the attributed names exactly.

Adwords won’t show your customized Ads if you don’t include a standard and non-customized Ad within each Ad group.

Countdowns run 5 days in advance of the end date by default and stop afterwards. You just have to drop the countdown parameter into your ad. It looks like this:

{=COUNTDOWN(“yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss” )}

For Example: If you’re running a sale that ends at 10pm on Christmas Eve, for example, you’d populate it as: {=COUNTDOWN(“2014/12/24 22:00:00″ )}

Your ad would then read like this:

special-deals

But to a user searching on the 20th December, it would read as:

special-deals1

Once your Countdown only has hours and minutes left, the ad will reflect this and would say, “Hurry, It Ends In 27 Minutes!”, if that was all the time remaining.

You can also apply Ad Customizers across campaigns, ad groups and keywords, so it’s very flexible.

For better understanding, the below examples are collected from Google AdWords Ad customizer support link

Example1: Using Target Keywords

Scott’s kitchen supply store offers hundreds of different stand mixers. He wants his ads to show details for each model, along with the current sale price he’s offering.

Ad customizers let him offer these details for all of his mixers, with only one ad. All he needs to do is upload ad customizer data with the details associated with each mixer. A line from this ad customizer spreadsheet might look like this:

keywords-spreadsheet

The “Target keyword” column shows what keyword should trigger the details in the other columns, each of which specify what type of details they include (text, number, and so on).

When Scott writes his ad, he uses customizers that reference each column in place of specific details. The first part of the customizer (“Mixers”) is the name he gave to his data set, and the second part (for example, “Model”) is the name of a column.

ad1

Now, if someone searches for “buy prowhip 300” on May 10, 2015, and this ad appears, the customizers update the ad according to the “prowhip 300” keyword, like this:

ad2

Scott’s ad now gives people confidence that he has what they’re looking for (a 5-quart tilt-head stand mixer), as well as an incentive (sale price) to buy a mixer from his store.

Example2: Use Customizers across a Campaign or Ad Group

Scott’s account is organized such that each campaign is focused on one category of appliances (e.g., stand mixers, blenders, and bread machines), with one ad group per brand. He finds that when people look for a particular model, they often end up buying a different model within the same brand, so he wants to highlight his large selection for specific brands. To do this, he needs to customize his ads by ad group and use the “Target campaign” and “Target ad group” columns. Here’s an example line from his ad customizer data:

ad3

He then creates an ad like this for each ad group:

ad4

Someone searching for “prowhip 300” might see his ad appear like this:

ad5

Example3: Countdown Multiplee Events

If you’re promoting recurring events, like quarterly sales, you can use customizers to update the details and date on your ad without having to reset its performance statistics.

Scott’s kitchen store hosts a speaker series that highlights a different culinary expert each month. He wants to show an ad that counts down to when each talk is scheduled.

Since the speaker series applies to his entire store, he’ll be customizing the ads in his entire account the same way. He doesn’t need to include any targeting columns in his ad customizer file, which he names “Talks.” Here are a few sample lines:

ad6

The ad text he enters might look like this:

ad7

When someone searches for “Mountain View appliance store”, he’ll see a different ad depending on when he’s searching.

ad8

On February 15:

No ads are running. Countdown customizers (by default) start showing their ads 5 days before the end time.

On April 1, at 5 p.m.:

ad9

If you know which promotions you have coming up, using a countdown customizer this way can save a ton of time.

Example4: Countdown to a One-Time Event

If you’re promoting a one-time event, you can take advantage of a countdown customizer without needing to upload any ad customizer data.

Scott’s Kitchen Store will be the first in the area to offer a much-anticipated new model of stand mixers, the ProWhip X. Scott’s going to unveil the ProWhip X at his store on the morning of October 20th, and wants to set up ads that count down to the event.

To do this, he doesn’t need to create a separate data file. He can put the date of the event directly in the ad text he writes:

ad10

If someone sees his ad on October 18 (two days before the event), it would look like this:

ad11

If your price and stock levels fluctuate frequently, you’ll need to re-upload your data into Adwords to reflect those changes in your Google Ads. It is better to avoid parameters that change your Ads more than once every day to create the best experience for your customers and also to make life easier for yourself!

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