An Introduction To The Ad Customiser

What is it?

PPC Marketing is growing and evolving all the time, with new platforms and functionalities becoming available for businesses to make the most of this marketing channel. One of the newer tools available in Google AdWords is the Ad Customiser.

This allows users to link data feeds to AdWords accounts in order to automatically change text ads in real-time, as a way of being as relevant and appealing to searchers as possible.

Who is it for?

Ad Customisers have many functionalities and various uses, but this case study illustrates how an e-tailer could use Ad Customisers to promote current voucher codes within their ad text.

Sales culture is growing more and more for online businesses. In the past few weeks we have had Black Friday, Christmas, Boxing Day sales and the start of January sales whilst Valentine’s Day is fast approaching.

Ad Customisers are a useful tool for an e-tailer because ad copy can be updated in bulk, which means that special offers and deals can be updated quickly and easily.

With more and more businesses operating a “lightning deals” style approach, deals can be set up in advance in order to prevent continual manual updating of each ad on the day of sales. This automation means that businesses can maximise the effectiveness of their ads during sales periods, without the stress and pressure of having to change the ads yourself.

Examples include:

• An Electronics retailer offering targeted ad text per product. When a user searches for Samsung X45, they are greeted with “Samsung X45 TVs On Sale For £299. Buy Today!” targeted at the Samsung TV’s Ad Group within the Samsung Campaign.
• A Toy retailer running delivery promotions in the run-up to Christmas, with the last date for free delivery falling on 22/12/15. The ad text would show “Free Delivery Ends 22/12/15” with the date dynamically inserted. This may be extended or reduced depending on stock levels, weather etc – it gives full control and means ads can be edited in bulk.

How does it work?

To illustrate how Ad Customisers work, I’m using a fictional e-tailer as an example – known simply as onlinestore.com.

The first step was to decide exactly what you are aiming to do. In this case, this online store offered a December promotion which allowed UK customers to get free delivery on orders over £40.

The next step was to download the Ad Customiser template from Google, which is available to download here - https://storage.googleapis.com/support-kms-prod/FBBEB850BC97953304D5F9885EFB91AAD371

The default headings and layout are as follows:

For onlinestore.com we needed to add the voucher code and spend, in order to show the free delivery threshold and code needed for the offer. The £40 value would go in as a price field, whilst the voucher code is entered as a text field; the month field was purely for our reference, rather than being used in the ad copy.

Once we decided upon our fields and values, we had to select the target. This can be drilled down into great detail as individual keywords can be selected, however, we opted to use it at the campaign level. This meant that any ads in the campaign with the insertion fields linked to this customiser data were affected by any changes.

The next step was to upload the spreadsheet into the AdWords interface. This can be done under Business Data within the Shared Library, by adding “Ad Customiser Data” using the button provided. 

Start and end dates can be set in the interface, as well as the addition of new items – for example, January’s code can be added in as a new item with the same data fields.

Once the spreadsheet was linked with the interface, we used insertion to enter the fields into the ad text, in the same way that Keyword Insertion is done. The data fields from the spreadsheet are entered in between {} brackets, and the field values will be inserted into the ad text when displayed in search engine results. The format of this is: {=SpreadsheetName.Field}, as shown below:

In the ad preview tool, it will now look like this:

Once the ad has been created and approved by Google, the ad goes live on search results pages with the customised data included in the text. When in the top positions, the ad text will look as follows:

Free Delivery On Orders Over £40. Use SAVEPOST40A At The Checkout

Being able to incorporate the delivery offer and voucher code into the ad text can improve click-through rates for the ads when compared to a generic ad not containing a voucher code. People are influenced to click on the ad and purchase whilst the voucher is valid, giving a timed call to action that generated conversions for onlinestore.com.

This case study is only one example of customisers, with more detail and fields available to users in order to maximise the effectiveness of their text ads.

Other Ad Customiser functionalities, including a countdown function, are explained in more detail here, or get in touch with us for help!