Google announced Ad Customizers yesterday, September 25, a new AdWords feature that allows advertisers to do exactly what the name implies: customize their ads (very creative, Google).
The twist is that you can now dynamically customize your ads in real-time without having to launch new ones and reset ad history. If you’re familiar with Bing’s {param2} and {param3} parameters, it’s similar to those but on steroids.
How Can I Get Started?
According to the AdWords blog, this should be rolling out globally over the next few weeks. You can read more about ad customizers on AdWords blog and Help Center. The Help Center has quite a few examples of how advertisers can leverage this new feature as well as all the necessary steps to set them up, but let’s run through a few scenarios.
What Can I Do?
Ever have a strategy where you counted days left in a promo within your ads? This can be super effective at creating a sense of urgency, but not in terms of workload. The simplest way to implement this strategy was through Google’s Automate Rules, but those could take a while to create. Also, those don’t always run at the exact time you scheduled them, causing issues with zero active ads or an old ad showing.
Launching new ads every day isn’t good for ad history either, impacting your Quality Score after every launch. With Ad Customizers, you can use the new COUNTDOWN function to dynamically insert the days remaining without having to launch a new ad. This should be a widely-adopted feature during Q4 for eCommerce advertisers.
Have a thousand products all with unique prices or discounts? See you in a couple weeks while you create those ads manually. Or you can use Ad Customizers to dynamically create the variations for you at scale.
For example, say you’re a clothing retailer and you know that you have varying discounts for brands of jeans. You can upload data to AdWords that will allow them to dynamically insert the correct discount for the correct brand. This capability would be most familiar to those that have used the Bing features noted above. (Is Google playing catch up to Bing for once?)
To get even more advanced, you can combine all of this together. Say you want a promo for a specific set of products with varying prices. You can create attributes for each of those to dynamically populate text for product, price, and the promo countdown.
Well, What Else Can I Do?
Great question… I thought the most interesting line regarding this new capability was in the Help Center: “Ad customizers can insert any type of text at all.” This made me wonder what can’t be done with Ad Customizers.
Do you have any creative ideas of what can be done?
